MAEV

For French, Quebec-based visual artist and musician MAEV (Maev Marchini), periods of intense hardship and difficulty produce the greatest artistic developments. An especially trying time in the late 1980s led her to abandon the oil painting she had long practiced and explore a very original and unchartered set of materials: copper and varnish. The resulting aesthetic, which she has continued to push and explore since that time, is characterized by bright, luminescent hues, fluid colors and glimmering ridges where the outlines of forms and figures are engraved into the copper plates.

Much like her choice of materials, MAEV’s subject matter is wildly eclectic, ranging from mystical and symbolist figures and scenes featuring supernatural characters and otherworldly landscapes to dazzling and purely abstract pools of swirling colors. Her unique process balances a set of fascinating formal tensions. Though she paints on a very heavy material support, the copper’s sheen reflects light elegantly so that the colored varnishes appear to glow, lending her works a sense of ethereal, serene weightlessness.