Luciano Maia

Luciano Maia is a Brazilian artist and surface designer born in Santarém, Pará, and educated at Universidade Cândido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro. Through painting, ceramics, and illustration, his practice investigates aspects of his northern Brazilian roots, engaging with memory, storytelling, mythology, and folklore while weaving together reality and fiction in queer regional narratives. Maia’s work is deeply informed by the mythologies of the encantados — spiritual entities central to Amazonian cosmologies — as well as by the legends and lived experiences of his childhood in Pará. Drawing on recurring elements from everyday life, such as fish, oxen, tables, and family figures, he constructs a symbolic vocabulary through which affection, memory, labor, emotional states, and life perspectives are transformed into layered visual narratives. His figures, at times undefined and nebulous, resist the colonizing gaze that seeks to immediately classify what it sees. Surrealist inflections lend his work a fantastic and expansive expressiveness, one that often seems to overflow the boundaries of the surface itself. This sensibility extends across his ceramics, which enter into dialogue with his pictorial universe, and his drawings on paper, whose floating forms seem to inhabit a space between material presence and dreamlike evocation. Across Maia’s work, color, the interplay of brightness and opacity, and the layering of forms contribute to a magical and symbolic dimension, as though each piece were a devotional object linked to something still in the process of becoming or being revealed. The artist has work in the collection of Sala Levino Fanzeres, Espírito Santo. He was a finalist for the 14th Prêmio Garimpo DasArtes in 2024 and was selected for the Temporada de Projetos at Paço das Artes, São Paulo, curated by Renato de Cara.