Until December 20, 2025, Maïa Muller Gallery presents its inaugural exhibition in Paris, “Dans le
rose qui pétille” (“In the Sparkling Pink”), conceived by artist Ludivine Gonthier.

The living energy of painting
Revealed at the 2024 Lyon Biennale, where her monumental canvases captivated audiences with their
striking intensity, Ludivine Gonthier, a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, approaches
painting as a physical, almost carnal act. Her work is uncompromising, inhabited, free, and fiercely
expressive — qualities now on view in the beautiful new space of Maïa Muller gallery in Paris.

Having trained with painter James Rielly, Ludivine Gonthier quickly distinguished herself through
her need for space and expansion; her canvases, often too large for the studio, already asserted their
presence. For her, painting means giving body to paint itself — allowing it to exist in space as a living
entity. Her works, saturated with vivid colors, combine paint and charcoal in a dialogue between
radiance and obscurity. The charcoal she favors disrupts the purity of pigments, introducing smoky
passages and muted, organic tones. The result is raw, vibrant, and perpetually in tension.

Ludivine Gonthier often depicts herself in many forms: full figures, busts, groups, unsparing selfportraits. Through these variations, she explores the fluidity of identity, the roles and masks we
inhabit, much like in The Sims, a game she cites as a metaphor for her practice: a space of freedom
within constraint, where identities are endlessly recomposed. Her painting does not imitate reality; it
captures its frictions, its slippages, its zones of uncertainty.

Faithful to Matisse’s conviction that one must “express a vision of color” rather than copy the world,
Ludivine Gonthier seeks a painting that is alive, charged with emotion and instability. Her universe,
at times chaotic, embraces disorder as a creative engine. Nothing in her work is decorative: every
mark, every stain testifies to a refusal of neutrality. What she pursues is neither beauty nor balance,
but vibration, imbalance, intensity, that raw energy that turns each canvas into a total experience.