Femme sans bras, le ventre vide Painting by Eva Mifsud

"Would you be able to talk about my paintings ?"...

These are the words she directed at me, that day, her paintbrush in her hand. Taken aback, I tried to dodge her request, referring, among other things, to my atavistic mistrust of these words which think that they can say everything.

"But I have no mistrust of words, I have none for my paintings", she objected while her paintbrush was moving. "And it would please me to have some words.", she added after a moment of silence.

And as I was searching, these words escaped me, sticky by their insignificance, gummy with vacuity, laden with rationalism, while my eyes wandered over the canvases which disorganised her studio, trying to link her painting to some known artistic movement.

A contemporary she certainly was but nevertheless unclassifiable. Neither academic nor abstract nor realist, nor really figurative. Decidedly, no word could fit this sensation, this intuition I had already experienced, more than already seen. Of that I was certain without a glimmer of knowing why.
Visceral. Violent. Disturbing. Just like her paintings, this reminiscence was all these, just as surely as it was not pictorial. I needed to seek elsewhere.
And as so often, I was about to give up when the answer popped up.

Bukowski ! 

I was at Bukowski’s, and experiencing again this gut-churning feeling caused by his writings. His words had read something unknown in me.

And her pictures were looking at me. Her paintings could see in me other unexplored things…
​
Bernard Convers.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists