Painter and film costume designer, Antoine Malliarakis, known as Mayo, born on 15 February 1905 in Port Said (Egypt), died on 1 October 1990 in Seine-Port (Seine-et-Marne).
Life
The son of a Greek engineer on the Suez Canal and a French mother, Mayo went to school in Ismailia, then with the Jesuits in Alexandria. He kept a Greek passport all his life, but his culture was French. Having come to Paris in the early 1920s to study architecture, he entered the Beaux-Arts and turned to painting. In Montparnasse he mixed with Man Ray, Robert Desnos, Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Foujita and Kiki de Montparnasse.
In 1927 René Crevel introduced him to André Breton, but Mayo declined to join the Surrealist group. He contributed to the review Le Grand Jeu of his friend Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, stayed in Berlin in 1928 and in 1929 exhibited with Giorgio de Chirico at the Galerie des Quatre Chemins. During his stays in Egypt he took part in the Cairo group Art et Liberté, founded in 1938 by Georges Henein, and illustrated texts by Edmond Jabès among others.
On Jacques Prévert’s recommendation he designed the costumes for Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. He then worked for some twenty years for film and theatre, before returning entirely to painting in the early 1960s. In 1966 he settled in Rome, on via Margutta. Suffering from an eye disease, he returned to France in the 1980s. He was made a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1986.
The work
Without attaching himself to any group, Mayo developed a personal style between realism, Surrealism and poetry. His first Parisian canvases show massive figures, often drawn from his circle; several works of the 1930s bear the mark of the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. He learned printmaking at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. In Rome he painted the ancient ruins of his “Roman period” and metamorphoses inspired by Ovid.
The gallery showed his work in the exhibition “Surrealist Prelude” (7 June to 6 July 2024).
Exhibitions and collections
- “Mayo, retour d’Italie”, Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, 1986
- “Surrealism Beyond Borders”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021), and Tate Modern, London (2022)
- Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Mathaf, Doha; Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut
At the gallery
- Surrealist Prelude 2024