Franco-Swiss, Florence Mahieu discovered art at a very young age thanks to her mother who frequently took her to the Louvre. At 16 while visiting the Fondation Beyeler, she was impressed by the work of Mark Rothko. Trained as a teacher, she learned artistic techniques from books and exhibitions as an autodidact. In her early days, oil and charcoal were her preference as well as large formats to satisfy her desire for colors and spaces. The artist is constantly torn between the pictorially correct and the right emotion. How to paint a flowing look, an emotion that beats in the temple, the smell of a memory, the colors of a burst of laughter or the freedom of silence? How to let go of the “necessity of” to make room for what moves us?