Bed, cradle, seat, children's play place, erotic field, therapeutic resource, grain sifter, the hammock is an important cultural element of the Yucatan Peninsula, even though it originated in the Antilles and its arrival in colonial times was due to the Spanish.

Made of cotton, henequen, sansiviera, nylon, crochet or silk threads, it is present in the daily life of the Yucatecans either in the interiors of their houses, hanging or, as if in a cocoon, without hanging, in any case with a practical function and - however modest it may be - also decorative.

Mexican painters of the 20th century were attracted to this portable domestic furniture and captured it in paintings, drawings, engravings, photographs and sculptures. Jean Charlot, French by origin and one of the pioneers of Mexican muralism, was in Yucatán in the mid-1920s and depicted in pastel colors and very simple shapes, almost with a childish air, two women conversing in a natural environment, framed by the curvature of two white hammocks that constitute the foreground of the painting, and the visual game they create leaves a girl and a dog half-hidden on both sides.

Alfredo Zalce, from Michoacan, lived and enjoyed the hammock to the point of photographing himself in one of them during his visit in 1945. In one of his lithographs he captures a Mayan woman in an almost implausible position of head and feet, with her body lying down. transversally and with her little son sitting on it, while the rhomboidal network and the curved lines of the hammock contrast with the grid of the brick floor. In another, throughout the piece, the hammock is perceived through a pavilion, in an effect of transparency that is difficult to achieve in the engraving technique. In addition to showing the interior of the room with a man who seems to be getting up and a standing woman who opens the pavilion, the exterior is seen through a fragment of a balcony, with a weather vane characteristic of the Mérida of those years.

The list of those who have addressed the topic is extensive and includes, among others, the capital's Julio Castellanos in “Bohío Yucateco”, where the hammocks serve as a counterpoint of stillness to the surrounding family chaos; to Raúl Anguiano, from Jalisco, who represented Mayan women lying on this traditional object through paintings and engravings, and to Francisco Zúñiga, Costa Rican-Mexican, who captured them in oil paintings and sculptures,

The painters who used it in their daily Yucatecan life could not be missing. Whether in series or individual works, Fernando Castro Pacheco made paintings and engravings related to women or couples in the hammock in different stages, sometimes considering the idea of sleep and rest, but above all in its erotic possibilities. In a series from the 1940s, the hammock is a site of miscegenation, where a copper-skinned man, whom we can assume to be an indigenous Mayan, embraces a white-skinned woman, with different love positions. In “Prose of Light”, a series of 15 engravings on copper foil, in the final years of his long life, his virtues are appreciated to make possible a refined repertoire of ways of taking advantage of the hammock in sexual terms.

A reiterated theme of Juan Ramón Chan, a graduate of the San Carlos Academy, was the hammock in multiple perceptions. It can be the feminine conformation that is achieved with the woman's body lying lengthwise or widthwise. In other cases, capturing movement, to the extent that the image of the flying bed is diluted until it almost leads to abstraction.

In more recent times, the hammock has been conceived in other ways, as in the case of Juanjo Dziu, from the new generation of Yucatecan artists, who has metaphorically reinterpreted it as a nest or personal enclosure through the installation “Intimate Space”, integrating art-object and drawings.