Galería Elba Benítez

Art works are composed, fundamentally, of two separate acts: that of their creation, and that of their reception. The oscillatory relationship between the two is a core aspect of  Violeta Maya’s paintings in the exhibition Lo que ocurre mientras seguimos con nuestros quehaceres (What unfolds as we go about our daily lives) at the Galería Elba Benítez.

Maya’s practice involves an alla prima (wet-on-wet) technique, freely applying vivid color onto fully wetted, unprimed canvases that have been laid flat on the floor. Because of this aqueous saturation, the canvas “welcomes” (in Maya’s words) the pigment, while at the same time the pigment continues to move after its application, blending and bleeding and changing shape as if taking on an agency or “will” of its own, independent of that of the artist.

This continuous exchange between intention and improvisation, control and collaboration, in Maya’s process yields a dynamic sense of depth and movement within the emergent pictorial field, a sense that outlasts the water’s inevitable evaporation and becomes an aspect of the finished, abstract painting itself. This sense of embodied depth and movement is echoed in the paintings in Lo que ocurre mientras seguimos con nuestros quehaceres in the slightly convex shape Maya gives them in their final form, expanding the large-scale canvases outward by adding an underlying layer of padding that imbues them with a gently ballooning presence, as if gestatory or respiratory. It is further echoed in Maya’s frequent grouping of the paintings in sequential series, like stills of a celluloid film, creating a sense movement not only within the rectangular confines of the canvas, but also implying it from one canvas to the next.

Indeed, as in the medium of film, the paintings in Lo que ocurre mientras seguimos con nuestros quehaceres employ stillness and movement, stasis and kinesis, in order to generate a kind of flux that is both physical and perceptual. As a result, the paintings might be thought of, like certain natural phenomena such as rivers and clouds, as both events and objects, verbs and nouns, at once here-and-now and there-and-then, while capturing and conveying the flow between the two.

George Stolz

Violeta Maya (Madrid, 1993) has had exhibitions at the Nassima Foundation (Tel Aviv, 2026); the Palau de Casavells (Girona, 2025, 2022); El Espacio 23 (Miami, 2025); the Olivia Foundation (Mexico City, 2024); ArtFarm Pilastro (Verona, 2024) and elsewhere. Upcoming exhibitions include the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid, 2027) and L’Apartment (Geneva, 2027). She received a BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2015.

Maya’s work is included in collections such as: the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, the Morgan Stanley Art Collection, Olivia Foundation, the Shah Garg Foundation, the Nassima Landau Art Foundation, and the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, among others.

Lo que ocurre mientras seguimos con nuestros quehaceres is the first exhibition by Violeta Maya at the Galería Elba Benítez.