"One day I met Eva. She had such an angry expression and seemed so scared that it frightened me. Wasn't she going to come out of the black drawing I had in front of me that represented her?
When later I began to look at the print of a sunflower photo, it was Eva again who appeared to me, it was the sunflower, tormented, her hair as if blown down by the wind, on a stormy day. This meeting of a universe that melts into another, these two images that secretly speak to each other, this "Eva-Tournesol" produced in me a surprise but also a silent joy.
This is the beginning of this series of photos...

… Little by little light appears, a lot of light until saturation. The flowers are transformed into silhouettes and minute details, imperceptible to the naked eye, are discovered as if the eye were a microscope to enter the threshold of the invisible. On the way to "withering", subtleties of colour and expression. Dance movements that express joy, sadness, perhaps a call from death. Or immobile postures that recall the dance Butō, "dance of the dark body". I melt into the vegetal, which has become hallucinatory and dangerous. Then I move away, the photos become more abstract, like deep black ink spots until the image disappears".
- Toshio Shimamura –

With "Eva", Toshio Shimamura returns to his favourite motif of flowers. In front of the artist's lens, these "still lifes", revealed in the traditional way with silver, take on a singular life. Through the play of their forms and textures, subtly sculpted by light, they express their personified character in an apparent immobility. And the image that the photographer returns to us with finesse is also one of frozen vanity and macabre dance, of the imperceptible movement of time passing, a poetry of universal beauty.