COPENHAGEN.- What is it that compels matter to take form? In Codex Seraphinianus (1981), Luigi Serafini imagines a world in which plants, animals, and bodies exist in a constant state of transformation, resisting explanation as much as classification. Rather than offering a taxonomy of nature, Serafini proposes a universe in perpetual becoming. It is within this territory – where life exceeds definition and form remains in flux – that Violeta Maya situates Absoluto Estado de Proliferacin, her first solo exhibition at NILS STRK.
Captivated by nature's continual process of creation, Maya explores the capacity of matter to sprout, multiply, and generate form. Across painting and sculpture, Absoluto Estado de Proliferacin (Absolute State of Proliferation) unfolds through forms suspended between the botanical, the corporeal, and the geological. Cavities, membranes, stems, swollen bodies, and flowing structures evoke seeds, organs, plants, landscapes, and bodies without ever resolving into any one of them.
Rather than depicting fixed forms, Maya's paintings become sites where form comes into being. Working wet-on-wet on unprimed canvas, she allows pigments to spread, absorb, and interact across the surface. Between intention and chance, images take shape without ever becoming fully defined.
Expanding into multi-panel paintings, Maya underlines the fluidity of form, reinforcing her understanding of life as continuous emergence rather than fixed identity. In Absoluto estado de proliferacin gamtico germinal and Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, branching structures spread across multiple canvases like roots, veins, or germinating shoots. Pools of color gather into embryonic shapes, extending beyond the limits of a single canvas.
The exhibition further introduces a new series of sculptural paintings in which rounded, swollen forms evoke bellies or seed pods, suggesting gestation, incubation, and the possibility of life held within. The belly becomes less a symbol than a portal into a state of aliveness, where creation is still unfolding.
For Maya, sculpture extends painting beyond the canvas, giving painted forms a body. La pintura va tomando cuerpo grows through the architecture of the exhibition, its swollen body rising from the ground while a slender extension reaches upward. Rounded, folded structures evoke seeds, organs, protective membranes, or bodies, suggesting gestation, incubation, and latent life.
El agua corriente no se corrompe (流水不腐) – a running water fountain – gives the space both pulse and sound, extending Maya's exploration of life beyond the visual. Water recurs throughout her practice as a generative force, essential to growth and transformation. Its continuous flow resists stillness, as though life were always beginning again – an absolute state of proliferation.
Violeta Maya works across painting, interaction, and moving image, developing a practice grounded in time, process, and transformation. Her approach combines sequential thinking with intuitive responsiveness, allowing each work to unfold in relation to the next and forming a continuous visual field rather than a series of discrete compositions. Painting, in this sense, becomes a durational act in which rhythm, accumulation, and change function not only as formal devices but as structures through which the work emerges. Her paintings evoke shifting atmospheres in which colour and gesture register states of emergence, tension, and flux.
This focus extends into her handling of materials, where the balance between control and contingency becomes central. Working primarily with wet-on-wet techniques on unprimed canvas, Maya allows pigments to spread, absorb, and interact beyond complete control, treating material behavior as an integral part of the work’s formation. The resulting surfaces hold a dynamic tension between intention and unpredictability, foregrounding process and material responsiveness as central to meaning. Expanding into multi-panel works and sculptural forms inspired by Japanese screen traditions, she introduces permeability and spatial interaction, reinforcing an ongoing interest in continuity, movement, and the blurring of distinctions between painting, object, and environment.
