“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.
The series forms part of his ongoing Olaismo works, a term Hernández coined from ola, Spanish for wave. Rather than a school or movement, Olaismo is a way of understanding life that embraces continuous mutation, in the same way that a wave is never fixed. It speaks to the ongoing reshaping of identities, political structures, and shared memories. Olaismo is not simply an aesthetic choice but an existential approach that sees transformation and fluctuation as the natural conditions of being. With this philosophy, the artist’s works, even when made on wood or canvas, behave like water: layered, unpredictable, and continually in motion. It’s a liquid way of thinking, and Hernández’s Piscinas Olaistas are the purest expression of it.
Developed over a decade, the series presents surreal swimming pools imagined with curving outlines and shifting blue-green surfaces. These are not architectural plans but thoughtful spaces designed to explore how water moves with emotion. As Hernández says himself, “the movement of water flows through every element of the design.” Rather than functioning as literal pools, the Piscinas behave more like visual essays. They are places where light drifts across surfaces in unpredictable patterns and where the viewer’s eye is encouraged to follow gentle, wave-like curves.
Instead of inviting swimmers, the pools invite contemplation. They carry the sensation of a space in which one might wander mentally, a space where water becomes a medium for thinking through transition. The works are built to hold emotion, not chlorinated water, and their gently undulating shapes suggest both the sea and the softness of recollection. This quality gives each painted Piscina the atmosphere of a reflective chamber. Viewers are nudged toward themes of loss, displacement and belonging. Water becomes a conduit for these reflections, and instability becomes a visual language rather than something to fear.
Within this broader context, the art-historical legacy of the pool comes into view. Hernández inherits the visual magnetism of the pool but transforms its meaning. The motif carries the weight of art historical associations shaped by figures like David Hockney, but while Hockney’s mid-century Californian pools symbolise brightness and ease, Hernández redirects that lineage toward something more introspective. His pools shimmer with colour yet hold the emotional weight of distance, movement, and longing. For him, the pool is not a site of leisure but a vessel for layered identities and histories, a space suspended between Cuba and Europe, between socialist memory and the personal reality of migration.
Olaismo is not presented as a manifesto. Hernández describes it instead as “a world without rigidity, a liquid world,” which encourages the viewer to imagine change not as rupture but as continuity. Water is both personal and political, and the pool becomes a metaphor for the ways cultures try to contain what is inherently fluid. In the Piscinas Olaistas, those boundaries soften. Edges blur. The result is a world that shifts gently between design and dream, between utopia and lived experience.