"The fact that the meaning of my paintings escapes even myself in the moment I create them does not imply that they do not have a meaning at all..." explains Eric Massholder in his attempt to highlight the role that the unconscious plays in the construction of his works.
His paintings are colourful; the techniques, the forms and the materials he uses are as diverse as the pretexts to open the doors to his dreams by staging his visions and fears or by envisaging the vices and anguishes of an unsheltered society.
Massholder's paintings often illustrate metamorphoses, interferences or deformations among which the orders of creation, humanity, minerals and the animal and plant kingdom interweave by revealing the complexity of the world, be the latter real or virtual and of life, be it experienced or phantasmagorical. The vigour and spontaneity of his brush strokes are subservient to the artist's expressionist palette that echoes the purest German painterly tradition. Graphical violence: chromatic improbability. Primitivism in accordance to his sculptures.
Opposed to this violence although affected by a similar problematic are Massholder's drawings. The latter are refined, architectural and act as a compensation for the work and the artist's persona.

Jean-Paul AUREGLIA
Extract from «Eric Massholder», Edition Signum 2006