With “Visage Théâtre”, the poetic palette of the painter Inès Longevial

When she describes the symptoms she experienced three years ago, it sounds as if she had been struck down by a strange illness. A burning scalp, restless hands, an irrepressible urge to write. "From my heart to my brain, I felt like I was on fire," says Inès Longevial. To calm this fever, the thirty-something, who has a successful career as a painter, began taking notes on her smartphone. Then, very quickly, she began pouring out the verses that came to her into small notebooks that she obediently handed to us, one May afternoon, in her Parisian studio.

Such a need to create was not foreign to her. As a child, near Agen (Lot-et-Garonne), where she grew up, drawing or painting was already akin to an uncontrollable outburst of passion. But for this outburst to take the form of texts is unprecedented. "Before, I was afraid of words," she admits. Inès Longevial, whose mother left a position as a human resources director a few years ago to write luminous novels, has also found the courage to publish her poems. For the first time, on the occasion of the " Skin of a Storm" exhibition, Organized from June 26 to August ¹ at her gallery owner Almine Rech, in New York, the artist publishes Visage Théâtre, a beautiful book in which twenty-five of her poems appear, interspersed with the reproduction of small surrealist works made on paper.

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