First of all, Floriane Maels's landscapes are some confessions of love for the wonderful region that she lived in during her childhood and where she has been living for more than twenty years.

Then it's a tribute to the beauty of these landscapes, to the power of the colour and of the light that bathe its villages. Floriane Maels loves above all the bright light of Provence , the twanging colours and the shapes. Her views of Provençal villages play with intensity on the coloured, pure and alive contrasts, which express the heavy presence of the sun, of the elements like an invitation to the intense pleasure of the coloured perception. Floriane Maels's painting is intense, it takes us into the matter. She reminded the words her mother used to say when she was a child: “ Look”, “Look and feel deep ”...just like an immersion into the colours, into the shapes, the lights, in the heat of the sun and also in the smells, in the air of Provence dispersing the particles of light in such a special way that it has the power to saturate the colours.

So what Floriane Maels paints on the canvas is not as much a piece of a fantasized or fanciful Provence, but with her photographic sensitive eye, she perfectly knows how to focus on her landscape, how to bring to light its sensitive beauty. Like if she had a synesthesic power, she knows how to depict the soul of a landscape, this unspeakable confusion of the senses that transports the viewer to the heart of her love for Provence .

For the engaging artist, to paint is a gift, not only a grace, but above all a way to get out of herself, towards the nature, the things, the people, a way of “communion”, she says, between the painter and its subject, between the viewer, the painting, and the painter. And if painting is for her as natural as breathing, it's because for her, it has a particular meaning : “breathe in” like one can be inspired by the perception; and “breath out”, like one can express on the canvas. To paint is really the liveliest of the breathings.

Marie Deparis, art critic.

« All the arts are like mirrors in which the human beings know and recognize something of themselves they ignored”. This nice sentence from the French philosopher Alain wonderfully summarizes the way Floriane Maels sees her “Emergences” series.

This series was born from the meeting between her experience of the portrait – about the character that takes up the foreground- and her experimentation of the abstraction. Indeed, while she works on the abstract backgrounds of her painting, some significant shapes are appearing little by little. She improves them until they become symbolic: the birds, the horses show the link between nature and human beings, our belonging to the earth, to the elements. The “Emergences” express the multiplicity of the human being, his cohesion into his variety and sometimes his oppositions, as the elements both contrast and complement each other.

Above all, the « Emergences » seem to be the various facets of a mirror reflecting the complexity of a personality, between dreams and imagination, desire and hope. This very special series is very different from the landscapes that the artist also realized, and opens to a more metaphysical dimension. Each part of her works can be understood like a part of a kaleidoscopic mirror of the artist herself, and also like some expressive surfaces in which the viewer can project and recognize himself. The “Emergences” are given like “mirrors of the unspeakable”. Each picture is to reveal a mysterious or invisible facet, something like silence, perhaps coming from the unconscious, talking about the artist as well as the world, the others, all the other worlds. This is why this “communion” is so important for the artist, because it's an invisible link, an unpredictable and powerful meeting between the painter, the painting, and the one who looks at it, is absorbed by it, recognizes it and becomes involved in it..

Marie Deparis, critique d'art.

*Vingt leçons sur les beaux-arts- 1931 - Emile-Auguste Chartier, dit Alain