Back in October, I received a rather unusual invitation. It was to a private view of Inside Out, an art exhibition at the Luxembourg embassy – or Luxembourg House as it’s known – in London. Not being an aficionado of Luxembourgish art, I was nonplussed at first. Then my eye caught the name of the painter whose work would be on show: Robi Gottlieb-Cahen, the writer/artist who generously sent me the manuscript of his trilingual Minute Stories (since published by Éditions Phi) so that I could have something to read in English from Luxembourg back in 2012.

Delighted at the chance to meet the man himself, I headed over to Wilton Crescent in Knightsbridge one evening after work. After hanging my coat up in a side room under an imposing picture of Queen Elizabeth II, I made my way into a high-ceilinged space lined with a series of artworks painted in Gottlieb-Cahen’s distinctive style – created by layering acrylic paint, ink and other pigments and then using acid to craft the image (you can see examples on Gottlieb-Cahen’s website).

I spent some time wandering among the works, admiring their eerie beauty and sometimes disturbing darkness, and it wasn’t long before I recognised the artist from the photograph on his exhibition leaflet. There he was, standing beneath the painting pictured above, engaged in an animated conversation.

I went over and introduced myself. Gottlieb-Cahen greeted me warmly and we spent several minutes reminiscing about the projects that brought us together and discussing his latest work.

The darkness I’d identified in the paintings was a central theme, he explained. Although he was a very positive, upbeat person, a lot of his works portrayed suffering, some of them drawing on the experiences of his relatives, many of whom were killed during the Holocaust. He did, however, always try to include some suggestion of hope in his creations.

‘My wife says for me it’s either psychotherapy or painting,’ he said with a grin. ‘I choose painting.’

He chooses words sometimes too. When I asked about his writing, Gottlieb-Cahen told me he had recently finished another collection of short stories, which he was hoping to place with a French publisher. Like Minute Stories, this collection featured some of his artwork alongside the text, although there were more words and fewer pictures than in the previous book.

As I said goodbye, he promised to email me one of his recent pieces. This he did a few days later and, testing my school-girl French to its limits, I read ‘Souvenir d’un pantalon à anges’ (Memory of a pair of angel trousers), a quirky story about a liaison that goes wrong when an innocent question leads the narrator to reveal the cruel and obsessive war he has been waging against slugs in his back garden.

Like Gottlieb-Cahen’s paintings it contains a mixture of lightness (in the form of many laughs) and more sinister elements. If it’s representative of the rest of the collection, French-language readers have a treat in store when Gottlieb-Cahen finds a publisher.

Meanwhile, if you’re in central London and fancy checking out his artwork yourself, Inside Out remains at Luxembourg House until 9 January 2015. Just email londres.amb[at]mae.etat.lu to make an appointment to see it.

Picture courtesy of Robi Gottlieb-Cahen