9/7/2025, the next day, on the way back.
(Following the exhibition Bodies and Souls, Paris, Pineault collection, July 2025.)
I think of life
I think of death
I was dreaming, says the song, but I never dream.
That’s why I painted stronger.
And why I already live so strongly now.
“Because once I was a young man and a young woman, a shrub and a bird, and a mute fish of the sea…” … and black and white, … everything is possible and beautiful
Fragment 117, Empedocles, 5th century BC, from the exhibition at Mac Val, July 2025. We had already seen it with Kate/Kae Tempest, Irish transgender poet, but we hadn’t believed enough, even though there is this possibility in intensity.

Since today, I have decided to call myself Sama, which means “little flower” in Palestinian, in this desert. Samama: the closeness of the names shows the closeness of peoples who have been at war for centuries. I no longer want to be mistaken for the aggressor and have to answer for Israel’s politics. And keep universality with the name Enrique. Because of course, it is a richness, to be multiple, of several origins, Sama is the only Palestinian DJ, a very young Arab girl, a bit like my daughter. We saw her in Nantes, and learned she had been arrested, imprisoned. A little flower that manages to grow in the desert. Now I must choose my artist name, which corresponds to a new birth.

​

And I see at Mac Val in Vitry-sur-Seine, the next day, at the cutting edge of contemporary art, an Arab artist from Morocco, Najia Mehadji, a central figure in contemporary art who paints immense flowers, huge roses or poppies, and at the "we are so few things, (...) it is my friend the rose who told me this morning…" from Ronsard, and I think again of the dried poppies you kept in your phone, which only ask to take up more space, so yes it is possible to do, to say that, the world is not far away, we are part of it and we have the right to think like that.

I am also the neutral girl so beautiful

“What more to do?
after
after
the Lascaux cave
after the Greeks, the Italian Renaissance of Botticelli, Michelangelo…
what to do after the self-portraits as women in all the roles assigned to women by Cindy Sherman?

What to do after Marina Abramović’s performance on the pain of the woman’s body?

Julia Kristeva “everything is possibly art, that is to say the multiplicity of possible sublimations...”
it is to seek something more, in the search to represent the human!
And even what is found inside!

It was by chance, unconsciously

I found these eyes these faces and then these bodies
which are mine
which are ours
you will see…

I will read a text that allows to enter my work: written with quotes from specialists about my work:
“This is a new attempt by a new artist to reach the human!” My characters, as Marie Hemery, psychologist, saw, are “these inner children who reveal themselves, surpass themselves, touch us in the raw expression of deep emotions. The unconscious would be this impression, this basic structure of identity construction. In fact it is expressed in black and white.” Marie Hemery,
And I add: They are from childhood, from the animal,.. They are there facing death, free and joyful...
Here is the full quote from Marie Hemery:
“My brain is always thinking about the idea of black and white in Enrique’s works. Like carbon paper or film development. The unconscious would be this mesh impression, this basic structure of my identity construction. In fact it is expressed in black and white... coloring only happens in consciousness.”

There is also Jannick Calvez, journalist in Art Images magazine, who spoke about my work during the exhibition Imprudent in Brest. She quotes Yves Bonnefoy about Alberto Giacometti’s work. It is known that Giacometti tried to draw his brother’s face every evening, but thought they were always insufficient and destroyed them in the morning. Only a few were saved by his wife. And they are sublime...

Jannick Calvez says “Enrique Samama approaches artistic creation as a liberating and chaotic experience, where he abandons control to let raw and disturbing emotions emerge. Until exhaustion. It is a fascinating exploration of the human psyche, marked by universal desires and anxieties.” “It is an intuition that goes straight to the enigma, to make it evident, straight to what ruins and scares to make it a shared good.”

When I work, for 8 to 10 hours straight, on dozens of sheets, I try to lose control and paint at the edge of consciousness. The next day I look and if it’s not good, I add stains. And it continues until everything is there.

For me, it is seeking love but being trapped, freeing myself through painting. These characters resist, rebel, stick out their tongues, dance... it is daring everything, and even showing these paintings and even having confidence! Because we have things in common (issues of gender, religion, race, society...), I think these paintings can help, we are different but we are the same on the essential points of life. For you too...

I hope you will look and see something new. Like for example with the German artist I met at a competition near Milan. I told her at the start I can’t speak German and Maryse told me to speak English to her. I decided to read her my text in English because she doesn’t have her glasses and can’t read. I read her a sentence and I ask “you understand?”
Because I feel I speak English badly and she answers “I understands!” And I read the text like that. She is a woman who dances with an umbrella, who makes photos she prints on plexiglass. And, at the end of the reading, she says with a big smile: “we are different but we are the same!”

I also wanted to talk to you about intensity and about Antonin Artaud, artist, writer, poet and drawer, who also wrote Van Gogh, the suicide of society.

I had written directly on the wall where I paint, in my studio: confrontation, where is it? And I had written underneath, ARTAUD first and that brought me to the idea I wrote: attack the paper! And later, I added: to reach softness. I had also written Bacon, Vellicovik, Arnulf Rainer, but I erased them.

And it is this softness that you noticed, you who look, you followers who follow me and you who work for the protection of children…

Artaud remained written because it is an unpassable limit: he is artist and mad in an asylum when he performs exorcisms, mixing the devil and his Christ’s body. But it is an intensity, he crosses the limit where he goes to madness.

And I take his intensity, madness to attack the paper, go as far as I can with painting. Brutal and soft. Attack the paper to reach softness.
I timidly call him, ... but if you want, you can come closer and see who it is and who you are. The character of the paper invites the other to stop, look, question, share and bring forth a positive part about oneself, about one’s actions, about one’s interactions with the Other... and realize where we stand.

To finish, I will read you one of my texts: Between (meaning to enter, and meaning between two or between several things)
between
between humans
between animals
between childhoods

between Gaza and Israel, between Ukraine and Russia, between Iran and Iraq, between China and India…

on all sides, every day

on all sides, every day
between you and me

between the monstrous and beauty
between the too sharp dichotomies
between softness and violence
between survival instincts
between everywhere
between the too strange

between the conscious and the unconscious

between
between my friends of all genders
between
between our animal part
and nature

these fears come from far away, from fear of death, from degeneration

to push beyond my limits
to no longer do nothing

between my exhibition on Montaigne’s lands about the Human (“Every man bears the entire form of the human condition.”) in 2008…
and the one we saw in August 2024, at the CAPC museum of contemporary art in Bordeaux with Hélène Cixous who takes this up, also with her notion of ghosts.

It is the survival instinct, I have nothing to lose, I am capable of everything, everything to gain in exchanges with others. A follower saw in one of the characters that it looks like a birth, in common.

Julia Kristeva: “everything is possibly art, that is to say the multiplicity of possible sublimations…”

End of the performance.