“Each reader” writes Marcel Proust “as he reads, reads himself”. In the same way, paraphrasing it, you can state that every one who enjoys a painting, observes a work unconsciously looking for his own Self, whether it is a “tromp l’oeil”, or a portrait, or a still life. Dealing with the creations on canvas of Eva Warnke, a fantastic artist with a cold Teutonic eye but with a warm Mediterranean sentiment, you can state that her work is a kind of ingenious optical instrument offered to the observer to allow him to make out what, without the painting he has in front of him, maybe he would have never seen in himself. Her painting is never a representation of pure and simple reality. Eva Warnke plunges the reality into an intimate, positive, fanciful atmosphere. For her, painting is a magic and sensual gesture. Her slender hands are skilful, her movements are precise, as if she perceives a subtle pleasure in caressing the surface of the canvas with colour, a kind of infinitely chaste and cerebral copulation. The representations that a first-class technique leads to three-dimensional values, don’t posses anything symbolic, but, expressing our worries, do exorcize them. You can deduce that Eva Warnke’s aim is to make the imagine/idea as clear as possible.
Her not-belonging to any group or current allows her to be free from obeying to stated canons or rules which imprison personality within well-fixed limits. What makes her unambiguous with the passing of time, as years go by, is the very strong feeling of the dialectics subject/object, a constant comparison between the weight of external reality and the weight of inner reality, a kind of surreal transposition of the existent, a lightning of the soul which confers her works a veil of true poetry. This is perhaps the explanation of a increasing success which springs from the magic of light, from the magic power of colour and from an excellent and relentless technique. This is, if we want, Eva’s subtle research of pleasure.

February 2001
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