BIG.
B U I L D I N G A N I N N E R A R C H I T E C T U R E
by Maite Nobo
I have always understood art the way an
architect understands space: as something
that must be built with intention, integrity,
and restraint. My work does not begin with
decoration or narrative; it begins with foundation.
What supports us? What holds when everything else
is removed? These questions have guided both my
life and my practice, eventually giving rise to BIG.
I was born in Havana, at the precise moment when
political collapse reshaped an entire country. My
family fled Cuba during the revolution, leaving
behind lineage, land, and certainty. I arrived in New
York City as an infant refugee, carrying none of
that history consciously, yet shaped by it entirely.
Displacement teaches you early that nothing is
permanent and that whatever endures must be
carefully constructed. This understanding, though
unspoken for many years, became the framework
through which I view both space and self.
That perspective led me naturally to architecture.
I was formally trained in interior design, deeply
influenced by the Bauhaus movement and its
philosophy of reduction, clarity, and purpose. Less is
more was never an aesthetic preference for me; it was
a discipline. Reduction reveals truth. When excess
is stripped away, what remains must justify its
presence. This belief governs not only how I design,
but how I live.
My architectural training taught me to see
relationships between proportion and emotion,
between material and memory, between structure
and spirit. Those lessons carried seamlessly into my
art practice. I do not approach a surface as a blank
canvas, but as a site. Each work is constructed,
layered, and resolved with the same care one would
apply to a building meant to last.
Materiality is central to this process. I work across
metals, wood, concrete, and architectural substrate,
materials traditionally associated with construction
rather than fine art. I am drawn to surfaces that
carry weight and labor, materials designed to endure
weather, time, and use. Architectural substrate, in
particular, holds quiet symbolism for me. It exists
to protect what lies beneath, unseen yet essential.
Working with construction materials represents
the necessity of building a strong foundation in
life, structurally, emotionally, and spiritually. Just
as architecture fails without integrity below the
surface, so do people.
There is an honesty in these materials that I trust.
They resist ornamentation. They demand respect.
Their imperfections are not flaws but records of
process. In this way, the work becomes less about
surface beauty and more about inner coherence.
My compositions rely on repetition, grids,
codes, and proportion. These systems function as
stabilizers rather than constraints. Predictability
creates rhythm; rhythm creates calm. Within that
calm, the body softens and the mind quiets. I am not
interested in spectacle or visual noise. I want the
work to slow the viewer down, to invite stillness in a
culture that rarely allows it. Emotion is present, but
it is disciplined. Intuition operates within structure.
For many years, painting was private, a form
of therapy, a way to process loss, betrayal, and
the fractures of a life lived intensely. Over time,
something shifted. The work stopped being about
release and became about transmission. I was
painting messages. Not literal messages, but encoded
ones. Meaning in my work is not delivered; it is
discovered. The viewer must remain present long
enough for understanding to surface.
This intentional restraint is particularly evident
in my smaller works on paper, which I call Big.
Celestials. These pieces offer a counterpoint to
the architectural solidity of larger BIG. works.
Intimate in scale, they invite close looking and
quiet engagement. I call the series Celestial because
it embraces the full spectrum of color, much like
light passing through sacred stained glass. Every
hue, from the deepest black to the purest white,
and all tonal variations in between holds presence
and meaning. Black embodies quiet mystery. White
offers gentle radiance. The remaining colors coexist
in deliberate harmony, reflecting the subtle beauty
of creation.
The Celestials are contemplative rather than
expressive. They are not meant to be decoded,
but experienced. In their stillness, there is space
for breath, for reflection, for a sense of infinite
continuity. They offer a moment of pause, a small
window into something larger than the self. Even
in their quiet, each one carries the subtle rhythm
of gesture, a tracing of attention and presence, like
calligraphy written by the body itself. In this series
I use calligraphy as an extension of the body within
my work. Each stroke flows from breath, intention,
and the subtle rhythm of the hand, carrying presence
and awareness. Movement records tension and
release, pressure and pause, making visible what is
felt but not always named. Through calligraphy, I
honor the full spectrum of human emotion, grief,
hope, patience, and love without literal depiction.
The body remembers what the mind cannot, and the
mark becomes a trace of that memory. Discipline
and surrender coexist; structure becomes vessel, and
feeling becomes tangible.
A more recent extension of this language appears in
a series titled Big. To All Eternity. In contrast to the
material restraint and architectural gravity of earlier
BIG. works, this series is unapologetically graphic,
chromatic, and visually expansive. Organized
through grid-based systems, the works operate
at the intersection of order and infinity, where
repetition becomes a structural and conceptual
device rather than a limitation.
The series originates from a dream in which I am
endlessly typing the same word (BIG.), without
completion or terminal point. The gesture initially
recalls childhood punishment, repetition as
discipline, obedience enforced through duration.
As the dream unfolds, however, the meaning shifts.
What appears punitive reveals itself as devotional: a
meditation on God’s eternity and humanity’s place
within it.
Within this framework, repetition functions as both
labor and reverence. The grid becomes a temporal
field, a visual architecture through which time is
suspended and attention sustained. Each iteration
is simultaneously uniform and singular, reflecting
the paradox of eternity itself, recurrence without
redundancy.
Color is central to Big. To All Eternity. The palette is
deliberately open, allowing for infinite chromatic
combinations that mirror the boundless variability
of creation. While the grid establishes containment
and order, color introduces vitality, movement,
and difference. Freedom, in this series, does
not exist out-side the system but emerges from
within it, reinforcing the belief that structure and
expansiveness are interdependent conditions.
At the conceptual center of my practice is BIG.,
created in 2019. BIG. operates as a contemporary
cultural sign, inheriting the logic of generational
images such as the 1960s smiley face while
reconfiguring it for a post-digital condition defined
by distraction and image saturation. Its formal
economy, legibility, repetition, and seriality enables
circulation across contexts, yet its restraint redirects
these mechanisms toward attention, faith, and
interior structure. Positioned at the intersection of
post-minimal seriality and conceptual practice, the
work enacts reduction as both a critical strategy
and a moral framework, privileging presence
over consumption. The original image adopts the
proportions of a cell phone, the defining object of
our era, simultaneously connecting and distracting
us. At its center appears a single word: Big. The
typography references early forms of lettering
legible to both humans and machines, subtly
bridging antiquity and digital futurism. BIG.
functions as an interruption. It asks the viewer to
disengage from constant stimulation and re-enter
physical presence.
BIG. is not about scale. It is about courage.
For me, BIG. represents unconditional love,
boundless, patient, and non-transactional. Rooted
in faith, the work is not symbolic in a traditional
sense, nor is it didactic. It does not instruct; it
invites. To think Big is to expand consciousness
beyond fear. To love Big is to act with openness and
generosity. To do good is to translate inner clarity
into lived responsibility.
Transformation, in my experience, is not decorative.
It is earned. I believe the most profound growth
occurs after disintegration, when identity, comfort,
and illusion have been stripped away. In that state
of human minimalism, we are left with essence. BIG.
occupies that space of reduction, asking not what
can be added, but what can be trusted.
Every mark carries the memory of breath, gesture,
and attention, a quiet witness that meaning is lived
as much as it is built.
In a world saturated with noise, speed, and excess
imagery, my work insists on restraint. BIG. proposes
that meaning is not created through accumulation,
but revealed through subtraction. It offers
architecture for the inner life, structured, grounded,
and built to last.
BIG. is not a brand to me. It is a practice. A
language. A framework for living with intention.
Like any structure meant to endure, it begins at the
foundation.
Think Big. Do Good.
E L E V A T E D M A G A Z I N E Spring 2026