“Waves are the language of the sea,” says Cuban artist Diango Hernández, who channels that idea into his surreal swimming pools series, exploring water as both a visual tool and a way of thinking. “A language that can be used for painting, for creating images of a more fluid world, a world without rigidity.” Raised in the historic inland city of Sancti Spíritus in central Cuba, Hernández grew up seeking the coastline, finding in the rhythm of waves a sense of happiness and completeness. That early relationship with water would eventually become the emotional and conceptual foundation of his work. That early imprint has surfaced with particular clarity in his Piscinas Olaistas series, a body of work depicting pools that seem to shimmer between memory and architecture.
Created between 2015 and 2025, Piscinas Olaistas presents imagined pools that fold painting and sculpture into a single piece of work, the quiet precision of which reflects Hernández’s early training in industrial design. At first glance, the works appear almost digitally generated, the kind of surreal render you could scroll past online. Yet each one is painstakingly created in oil, a reminder that analogue hands can still outplay the cool perfection of the algorithm, with their curving outlines, shifting blue-green surfaces and gently undulating patterns evoking water in constant motion. Rather than a backyard amenity, each pool is a metaphor for how life ebbs and flows, recalling the artist’s childhood and reflecting his enduring interest in the ways water connects to the human body and mind.
