National Museum of Fine Arts

His iconography is sparing and internal: letters, numbers, and the ampersand float or lean, almost as actors on a stage. According to the curatorial text, such symbols “become characters that inhabit and dialog in a space where time seems to crystallize.”

What strikes most profoundly in this retrospective is the consistency of Maza’s aesthetic inquiry. The works from his informalist beginnings still reveal traces of gesture and raw materiality, but even then one senses a desire for structure. As his career advances—through his years in New York, London, and Paris—his forms gradually clarify, even as they retain their poetic ambiguity. In his later pieces, cubes, prisms, and architectural volumes dominate, often rendered with delicate translucency or subdued, almost somber coloring.

 
Yet the exhibition is not merely a formal tour. It invites a deeper meditation on perception and meaning. Maza’s paintings unsettle the viewer: what at first seems familiar — an arc, a rectangle, a letter — slowly reveals its strangeness. The instability of perspective and the absence of a conventional horizon reinforce the sensation that these are not windows onto a world, but constructs of the mind. The critic in Pablo De Monte notes that the horizon “not only divides sky and earth: it organizes, orders, and proposes a form of looking.”

This show is also a celebration of Maza’s cosmopolitan life: born in Buenos Aires, trained in informalism, seasoned in New York, and finally settled in Nogent-sur-Marne, France. His journey infuses his work with a transnational intellect, yet the exhibition never feels didactic. Instead, it allows each painting to speak in its own mute, haunting language.

National Museum of Fine Arts

“La construcción de la pintura” is not just a retrospective—it is an invocation. In the hushed space of the gallery, Maza summons us into his architecture of symbols, where every stair, every floating letter, becomes part of a silent enigma. It is precisely this unresolvable mystery—and the painter’s refusal to tidy up meanings—that gives the show its profound power.