Maritza
Caneca

Between declivity and depths, the visual artist Maritza Caneca, born in Rio de Janeiro (BR) and resident in Miami, develops her poetical works from an avid interest for the pools, in its own variety of architectural and imaginative arrangements. The photographic obsession results from a previous experience, when an astonishment takes her, unexpectedly, during a visit to her family’s old house: she had found in the uninhabited pool of her family the abandoned scenario in which her unbroken childhood memories surfaced again. Amid the bittersweet feeling of remembering the joys of youth and the unforgivable action of time, Maritza recognized that space as a wrapper of memories contained in its curves and tiles.

From this episode, the artist took the pools she found through the lenses of her camera. Beginning in the '80s as a photographer of still in cinematographic filming and one of the brazilian female pioneers in film photography, her practice condenses in her series the desire to inhabit spaces as a cinematic occupation. Her photographs evoke scenes and memories of the promise that something is yet to come - as in the series that the bluish and full pools exude their exuberance and invite the viewer to take a real dip in the gaze - but also reports the deepness of time, like the series which she shoots the empty ones. Immersed in the silence of the present, the empty pools point to another time, inscribed in the marks of the tiles and in the viewer's imagination, here invited to fill the space with his reports of what must have happened in these scenarios.

For the 15th Arte Laguna Prize, the artist submits 5 photographs of empty white pools in a desire to expand time through photography. In an astonishing relationship between the austerity of white and the collision with emptiness, the photographs propose a reflection about this architecture, whose borders on the inhospitable, and the current moment of unraveling between public and domestic life caused by the global pandemic situation. 

EXHIBITIONS

During the 2016 Olympics in Rio, Caneca exhibited at the renowned Paço Imperial. In 2017, she was commissioned by the Copacabana Palace to create an intervention during the hotel pool's first remodeling since being built in 1934. Caneca has exhibited in galleries in São Paulo, New York, Budapest, and Basel, amongst others. Her work has been featured in numerous art fairs such as Scope Miami, Scope NY, Art Rio, SP Art, and Copenhagen Art Fair. In 2019, Caneca had a solo exhibition at the Anita Schwartz Gallery, Brazil, and exhibited at the PH21 Contemporary Photography Gallery, Budapest. Most recently, Caneca has been selected for a public art project at Miami International Airport in 2021 and debuts on november the project Arts + Recreation, a large-scale photographic mural in close proximity to the Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami. Caneca is a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex, in Miami, where she lives and works.