SWIMMING POOL AS A SENSITIVE LANDSCAPE
Maritza Caneca
In her second exhibition at Brisa Galeria, Maritza Caneca brings to the gallery space an intimate and expanded archaeology of the swimming pool — a central element in her poetics for over a decade. More than a recurring motif, the pool in Caneca’s work is a visual and affective device where memory, desire, contemplation, and structure intertwine.
The artist presents a set of newly created small-format works that challenge the boundaries
between technique, medium, and language. Among them are delicately hand-embroidered
cyanotypes on fabric, photographs layered with colored filters (gels) that add depth, color, and luminosity, and oil paintings that translate the geometry of tiles through chromatic precision and pictorial sensitivity. Together, these pieces offer a sensorial and material immersion into the forms of water and the architecture that contains it.
The act of embroidery, for instance, reclaims feminine manual labor in dialogue with a 19th-
century photographic technique, establishing an alternate temporality — slow, intimate —
within the image. The green gels applied to the photographs act as layers that both conceal and reveal, creating atmospheres that evoke memory as much as fiction.
In her paintings, Maritza Caneca adopts the language of geometric abstraction to reorganize
the iconography of the swimming pool. Tiles — fragments of functional architecture — take
center stage as chromatic modules that construct ordered and vibrant surfaces. The artist
investigates repetition and variation within the grid, generating compositions that shift between graphic precision and sensory nuance, where light seems to emanate from the pictorial structure itself.
In this new phase of her research, Maritza Caneca affirms the power of repetition and variation as a conceptual strategy, inviting the viewer to revisit the same — water, tile, edge — with both freshness and estrangement. There is a politics of detail at play, a refusal of spectacle, which repositions the swimming pool from the realm of the picturesque image to the realm of plastic and poetic language.
The exhibition unfolds as a small affective atlas, where each work serves as an entry point into a liquid, fragmented, and deeply personal cartography.
(Brisa Galeria, 2025)
