Cossette Zeno (b. 1930) was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but grew up in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her early artistic work, influenced by her mentor Eugenio Fernández Granell at the University of Puerto Rico,

challenged academic norms. Granell, an exiled Spanish Surrealist, described Zeno's abstractions as 'scorching inventions that act on the world of visual representations like a magical blowtorch.' In 1953, Zeno earned a scholarship to study in Paris and quickly joined the Surrealist group upon her arrival in September 1953. During this period, Zeno began producing metaphysical, biomorphic, and proto-feminist works that explore space, identity, and the role of the human and feminine in the surreal.

She was enthusiastically received and Breton personally invited her to his home to meet his family and introduced her to the Swiss artist Méret Oppenheim, initiating a significant and fruitful friendship. In July 1954, Zeno exhibited her work at L'Étoile Scellée, a major Surrealist centre in Paris, alongside canonical figures.

Aquatic Suspension is one of the major works from this period. In the painting, a curious manta-like creature navigates its way around the canvas. It is a highly erotic and vulval form, with winged limbs and extremities that extend beyond the picture plane onto the frame. The sea is an important motif in the language of Zeno's work. Zeno used to dive at the Escambrón Beach in Old San Juan, where the depth and vastness of the water touched her life irreversibly. The mystery of the sea was for Zeno a tremendously liberating space, and is made manifest in the sensuous forms of her art.