Maria Svarbova: Surface

Svarbova’s photography is, for the most part, held in a very specific context—her native Slovakia. Her childhood was deeply shaped by Soviet-era buildings in the Brutalist style, constructed before the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, it wasn’t until 2014, when she rediscovered the swimming pool of a public high school, that she recognized the timeless potential of these spaces. Fascinated by the site’s well-preserved condition despite having been closed for a long time, she decided to photograph not only pools in Slovakia but also in other parts of the world over the following ten years.

In addition to the use of symmetry, which is a key element in her work, Maria incorporates other visual resources into her work, such as tension, rhythm, and movement. However, the most important and powerful element in Svarbova’s work is time. On this subject, the artist says in an interview: “It makes me sad to think about time, to see how it never stops. Every time I return home, I see that my parents have aged, and that terrifies me. Photography is my way of using time, through it, I can stop it.”

Under this context, Svarbova’s photography is both an effective way to express the plasticity of the water’s surface in swimming pools—where “the only thing swimmers can do is see their own reflection in the perfect mirror of the pool’s water”—and a place where time stands still. Maria continues: “Lately, I use many clocks in my work. Clocks measure time, but photography stops it, so time no longer moves forward.”

For this exhibition, Maria Svarbova’s debut exhibition in Mexico, Surface: timelessness stands out as the guiding principle of her photographic practice. timelessness: the quality of that which remains unchanged over the years, that which endures even if the walls of empires collapse, and in the midst of which the artistic act—particularly photography—is an act of resistance against the passage of time. Maria Svarbova’s work thus aims to fix in the memory of the viewer and herself moments that are lost, so that they may remain, like reflections on the surface of the water in any swimming pool around the world, at all times.

– Manuel Tuda