Mónica Canzio
Every Day
July 1 to February 29, 2026
Text: Marina De Caro
Curatorial text
Every Day
Continuing to speak with Miyuki, every day
Fire is always followed by water.
Mónica Canzio’s studio suffered an incident that did not become a tragedy.
A fire of uncertain origin burned the studio while she was preparing the exhibition Every Day for OTTO Galería. By luck or fate, some works managed to be saved, and without rest, Mónica decided to keep working toward her show while reorganizing herself — emotionally and practically — amid the reconstruction of her studio. She found enough humor to begin the journey after the near-tragedy.
Can we imagine that she continues to inhabit the skin of Miyuki — that woman who, in Didier Decoin’s novel The Office of Gardens and Ponds, set in eleventh-century Japan, also embarks on a journey after a tragedy, the death of her husband, a carp fisherman? In her previous exhibition, Mónica paid homage to Miyuki with a series of kimonos made from fabric scraps gifted by her friends. Mónica’s mother was her companion in the making and sewing of these garments.
Do Miyuki and Mónica share something in common?
Being family with water unites them. Mónica’s father used to take his family out sailing and fishing, or simply to feel like a fish.
Every Day is the small attempt of someone who stops thinking much beyond today — a step-by-step process of reconstructing existence and making it tangible, wanting to reproduce one’s own presence through a gesture. The traces of a fishing net guide this exhibition; the carbon residue is the last remnant of memory.
The texture of a friend’s garment led her to her father’s fishing nets; the friend’s garment remained in the anecdote. The works Mónica presents in this exhibition seem to bring us closer to that liquid legacy of fishermen — making memory, or imprinting memory. One movement is enough: that is Mónica’s guiding principle in this series of works that oscillate between painting and drawing. She does not represent — she presents the resulting marks left by the imprint of the net which, loaded with paint, leaves a delicate trace on a charcoal-colored ground. Mónica prints the net onto canvas or paper simply by resting it down, or through gestures of furious waves inside a small boat cabin transposed to the hallway of her home. Nets that make waves over the colors of the coast, drawn from family photographs and found affective archives. The artist insists on leaving that writing which runs through her — the kind one reaches for in moments when the future seems to dissolve between one’s fingers. A trail of color: spatula and paint mark the territory across several of her works. Chromatic gradations like the temperature of daylight itself.
Between the waves and the calm.
With an insistence on subtlety and the voice of silence, she approaches the Japanese philosophy of kaizen — the philosophy of small, constant changes.
The present. Every Day is a diary of a fire, with the sensitivity of someone gathering what is no longer there while remembering where she comes from, in order to reassemble that stone path her grandfather told her would always be needed — as they chipped stones together.
Marina De Caro
Mayo 2026
