Maye

Maye is the working name of Victorien Liria, a French painter and graffiti artist born in Sete, on the Mediterranean coast of France, in 1990.

From lettering to canvas

Drawing occupied Maye from childhood, but his first public medium was the wall. He began painting graffiti in the streets of Montpellier and has pursued a sustained investigation of lettering since 2004. Influenced by the local scene, he treated every encounter as an apprenticeship and made a place for himself among his peers, improving quickly on the wall. He is self taught as a painter. In 2013 he moved from the wall to the canvas, and he has since worked in both registers as complementary practices. The canvas allowed him to carry over the experiments he had developed on ephemeral supports and to begin building a body of work meant to last. Because a painting endures in a way a wall does not, he uses it to deploy his taste for detail and for narrative.

The painted world

Maye's canvases carry the viewer through allegorical scenes drawn from his own experiences and memories and fed by his imagination. A perfectionist, he plays with the depth of the image, with effects of light and with the rendering of materials, building landscapes in which nature creeps back over the ruins of a futuristic world. The confrontation between technology and a luxuriant vegetation is offered as a reminder of how fragile the relationship between people and nature has become. The result is neither a warning nor a lament so much as a description of a world carrying on after its own collapse.

Figures and atmosphere

These settings are inhabited by long limbed figures, supple and curved. Their heavily detailed clothing partly reveals bodies that are half mechanical, so that, like the environment around them, these women and men are composed of natural and artificial elements at once. The easy interaction between the human figures and the animals that surround them cuts against the surrounding chaos and introduces a note of hope. The same optimism runs through his pastel palette, whose warmth and light break through in places, and it distinguishes his work from the darker registers common in contemporary urban painting.

Murals and public work

Alongside studio painting Maye has continued to work at architectural scale. In 2019 he took part in the K Live festival at Sete, contributing to the MaCO, the open air museum of monumental murals that the festival has built across the town and for which the local tourist office organises guided and school visits throughout the year. His work is also promoted by the Urban Art Fondation in Toulouse, which lists him among its artists and reproduces his biography.

Market

Maye's paintings entered the auction market in the early 2020s, where they are catalogued under the urban art heading. Both unique canvases and signed, numbered screenprints have been offered, the prints in limited editions. Sales have been handled by houses in Paris and Brussels as well as by LLB Auction, where two lots by the artist have been offered and both found buyers. He signs his work with the mononym Maye and uses it publicly, including on the social media accounts through which much of his mural work circulates.