ON Tinas by Max Hernandez Calvo

In the series Tinas, we find a few terrazzo tiles on which the formwork’s structures for some bathtubs are inscribed. The terrazzo blocks mark the area they occupy, while the formwork delineates the outline of the bathtubs and emplaces the site for a horizontal body (its unit of measurement). Although these wooden structures are based on construction techniques, they also evoke architectonic buildings, as if they were diagrams or quaint mockups of a city, disrupting the idea of scale at play therein. At the same time, the bathtub as referent introduces the idea of a contained surface (water), that the terrazzo displaces at the ground level. This surface support—the gallery’s floor— appears as if cracked, given that the bathtubs seem to be between one level and the next, as if their form (and implicitly their content: a body) were actually below the gallery’s floor. (...)