Walls&Love 2026: New Murals Across Valence Draw on Architecture, Memory and the Rhône
Walls&Love 2026 Valence brings a new series of murals to the French city by Rémi Tournier, SOBEKCIS, Taquen and Sêma Lao, alongside a large collaborative graffiti jam featuring regional artists. Presented as the fourth edition of the mural and graffiti festival, the 2026 programme extends Valence’s public art landscape through works shaped by architecture, local history, human experience and the ecology of the Rhône. Across the city, each commission develops from a distinct reading of its location rather than from a shared visual theme.
Organised by the Sorry Graffiti collective with the support and guidance of the City of Valence, the Rhône-Alpes Region and its partners, Walls&Love brings international, regional and local artists into public space over three weeks, with audiences invited to encounter the works as they develop and meet the artists on site. The festival describes these exchanges as central to its identity, placing the making of the murals within the social life of the city rather than restricting attention to the finished works alone.
Walls&Love 2026 Valence
The principal murals for 2026 reveal a broad range of approaches to contemporary muralism. Rémi Tournier draws on the peculiar architecture of a house in Rue Faventines; SOBEKCIS develop an abstract composition in response to the structures of the historic centre; Taquen takes the Roman name of Valence as the basis for a reflection on courage; and Sêma Lao turns towards the fishing history of Basse-Ville and the wildlife of the Rhône.
The connections between them are subtle, but they give the edition a clear sense of place. Each artist begins with something already present in Valence, whether architectural, linguistic, historical or ecological, and develops the work from there.
Rémi Tournier, Waiting for the Sea
At 151 Rue Faventines, Rémi Tournier found the premise for Waiting for the Sea in the building itself. Seen from above, the house has the appearance of an ocean liner stranded within the city, its seaside architecture suggesting a vessel that has somehow arrived far from the water. Tournier responded with a 13 by 6 metre still life painted in spray paint, using that unusual setting to explore a more personal sense of displacement.
The artist describes the work through the experience of adapting to a life that does not entirely feel like one’s own, continuing through the present while sensing that something remains elsewhere. The imagined sea carries that tension between endurance and longing, themes that sit naturally within a practice already concerned with silence, nostalgia, everyday life and what Tournier describes as the “sadly beautiful.”
Born in 1984 and originally from the Lot region, Tournier emerged from the Toulouse graffiti scene from around 2007 before spending close to a decade working with SismikAzot. Since 2021, he has pursued a more personal direction, bringing the experience of graffiti and large-scale painting into a quieter figurative language.
SOBEKCIS in the Historic Centre
At 1 Rue Juiverie, close to Valence City Hall, Serbian twins Ivan and Nikola, known as SOBEKCIS, created an untitled mural measuring 17 by 10 metres. Their practice develops from graffiti, but its familiar signs have been progressively dismantled into gesture, texture, colour and fragments of letterform, resulting in work that moves confidently between urban art and abstraction.
For Valence, the brothers began with unconscious gestures before arranging the composition in relation to the surrounding city. Shapes follow and counter the lines, angles and architectural structures nearby, while the predominantly black-and-white palette is interrupted by stronger passages of colour. The historic setting sharpens that contrast, placing their contemporary abstraction against an older architectural fabric without attempting to imitate it.
The brothers describe their work through ideas of duality, a process closely connected to painting as twins, where opposing elements search for balance. That sensibility is visible here in the relationship between monochrome and colour, spontaneity and order, and the dense painted surface and the architecture around it.
Taquen, Valentia
In Basse-Ville, Taquen takes the history of the city’s name as his point of departure. Valence derives from the Roman Valentia, while the Spanish word valentía refers to courage, giving the artist a linguistic connection through which to reconsider what courage might mean.
Rather than focusing on strength as self-sufficiency, Taquen turns towards the capacity to accept defeat, recognise vulnerability and ask for support. His 14 by 9 metre mural expresses this through a restrained image of a hand resting on another person’s back, a gesture that carries the work’s emotional weight without requiring a more dramatic narrative.
Positioned opposite the monumental staircase beneath Saint Apollinaire Cathedral, Valentia places an intimate gesture within a setting defined by substantial architecture, giving the mural a quiet presence that feels carefully judged for the site.
Born Gonzalo Marin in A Coruña in 1992 and now based in Madrid, Taquen studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. His work frequently brings together human figures, animals and the natural world through an economical use of line and divided areas of colour, with movement and transformation remaining central to his practice.
Sêma Lao, The Great Cormorant’s Fishing
Sêma Lao looks towards Basse-Ville’s relationship with the Rhône in The Great Cormorant’s Fishing, a diptych painted across two façades of the Pêcherie apartment complex.
The murals draw on the historic fishing traditions of the neighbourhood and the presence of the great cormorant along the river. One wall shows the bird feeding, while the second depicts it with its wings extended after diving, a familiar posture linked to the permeability of its plumage and the way the species dries itself after entering the water.
In Basse-Ville, the choice of the cormorant gives the work a direct local resonance, linking the residential setting with the river and with a fishing history that remains part of the neighbourhood’s identity.
Lao brings the subject into her characteristic language of saturated colour, transparency and layered movement. Born in 1987 and of Chinese-German descent, she is a self-taught painter who moved towards spray paint in 2011 after experimenting with several techniques, with animals and portraits becoming recurring elements across her practice.
The Walls&Love 2026 Graffiti Jam
The programme also includes a 60 metre collaborative wall in the Basse-Ville municipal parking area by Le Môme, Alone, Heta, Monsieur S, Jen Miller, Spire, Chipo and Ynot. Bringing together artists from Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Pierrelatte, Valence and the surrounding region, the project places the collective energy of the graffiti jam alongside the festival’s individual mural commissions.
Working within a shared palette selected in response to the surrounding architecture and natural environment, the artists retain their individual styles while contributing to a continuous composition across approximately 120 square metres. The inclusion of the jam also keeps graffiti culture visible within a programme that ranges more broadly across contemporary mural practice, acknowledging the collaborative traditions from which much public painting has developed.
Temporary Walls on Boulevard d’Alsace
Alongside the permanent commissions, Walls&Love 2026 continued its temporary mural programme on Boulevard d’Alsace, where artists including Danay & Ekis and Koma contributed shorter-lived interventions during the festival. These works introduced a more immediate, changing rhythm to the programme, contrasting with the larger murals intended to remain within Valence’s public art route.
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GraffitiStreet works with a considered programme of international street and contemporary artists, with selected original works, editions and works on paper available for acquisition. For collector enquiries, current availability or private viewings, contact the gallery directly or explore the online collection.