"Battered Woman"
65X50 cm
 Oil on cardboard 
 
I worked as I often do at home on my large glass table.  Amid the sheets of paper and charcoal, a purple orchid raised its head.  I listened to the radio while drawing.  The afternoon went by between habit and concentration.  I had no idea that the purring of the radio was going to upset me that day like it did.  Someone was speaking and it was to bring up the death of a battered woman.  The story of this drama, so banal alas, and told in a monotonous voice, tore, as in slow torture, the quiet assurance of studious days.
 I saw this woman, without knowing her, in her beautiful and pure skin.  How can we understand that we could have killed her, beat her to her agony?  Stretched out on the ground and hit again and again.  I suddenly felt, as a woman, despised as something being broken.  The rage in me mingled with the despair of feeling my world of woman wavering beneath my feet;  the illusory dignity of existence suddenly dawned on me in the crude day of the news.
 
But already the pain I was experiencing was changing into aesthetic considerations: the poor woman was slowly metamorphosing, I saw her as frail as my orchid on her stem, in the elongated daylight.  The mauve crimson of the flower had the bloody tint of bruises on the beaten flesh.  I observed the flower where beauty was seen to be humiliated and broken.  And, unwittingly, but, perhaps because I couldn't believe this woman's death, my eyes were degrading the purplish hue of the orchid.  It was the flesh of this poor woman, as if she was healing, which turned blue and continued on the palette, changing to green, then to a yellow which announced the resurrection of her flesh. And, under my hand, a work was born ... the woman with my mingled despair, the empathy of the same pain of being in the world.
 Ameneh Moayedi 2020 in Paris
(Part of the sale to help women victims of violence)
 
The painting has been exhibited in Paris, Switzerland, and on International Women's Day, the cover design of the magazine. (And of course its series was in Poland and Berlin).