Thank you.
Growing up in Mexico, going from a very young age to archaeological sites.
Sometimes you're visiting the sites that had very large civilizations and now you're seeing a complete abstraction of that.
And there is something about puzzling and figuring out that I think is something that I enjoy in my work, triggering at ideas that are there but they're not obvious, or that they might invite whoever is experiencing them to speculate.
And I think that's part of what I enjoy working with architecture but in a more sculptural manner.
I'm Carlos Matos, I'm an artist based in Mexico City and this is my studio.
I'm an architect, I do practice architecture, but I like to weave in and out of the realm of architecture, you know, into sculpture and material experimentation.
I grew up in a family of mostly architects.
Both my grandfathers from both sides were architects.
And growing up in these conditions made it very easy for me to kind of follow on that path.
So it felt very, very natural for me to continue on that direction.
And simultaneously the house where I grew up that my father was building was endlessly in construction.
So I think that somehow became the perfect setup for me to develop the work that I do today.
Yeah well, I'll show you the house that I was mentioning earlier on, which is the house that my grandfather built for himself and where I grew up visiting very often.
And at some point, my grandfather, although he was a functionalist, he later evolved into a much more experimental and sculptural approach, and in his house, I think, is where he actually manifested all of the ideas that he he wanted to develop with his obsession with the Mobius form.
So the house is actually set in a triangular grid and it's actually a Mobius, that is like a continuous grid, that kind of hoops around the different parts of the buildings.
This was his house and also it was his studio.
So that's where he lived and worked throughout most of his life.
I think that Mexico is a place that enables experimentation because of, you could say, lack of regulation or corruption, but there is an inherent freedom in a place like Mexico, where A lot of people have come here historically, because there is that possibility to explore out of regulation or other limits.
I think there's also a lot of destruction of the heritage, which is unfortunate, but I guess the freedom to destroy that heritage and to knock down, you know, a building that is worth preserving and opening up another shopping center or something like that, is the same freedom that all these architects and artists have at the same time to create something propositive and also to reinvent the culture itself, so it doesn't become all about preservation.
When I was leaving, I also took a lot of the leftover books from his studio and library and ordered these amazing German magazines called Das Monster, which are uh, he had a whole collection which are all of those, and they're they're, they've been an incredible source of inspiration lately, because i mean, they're mostly about churches, but every aspect of the church, of the construction of churches, no.
So you know, i really like the different takes on.
I don't know what that is.
I don't know if it's like a saint or something.
But I like how the different takes on representation, or even the chalice or the bells.
And it's interesting.
I guess it's a form of architecture that architects don't.
No one wants to build a Catholic church anymore.
But I think there's elements of how they were conceived that I think can be utilized for all of architecture somehow.
Yeah. incredible projects.
I use architecture as a medium, because architecture in a way becomes the envelope of everything.
But I don't necessarily separate architecture from sculpture or from designing a light.
I think it's kind of all part of the same kind of realm.
Architecture and sculpture I think they've always been fused.
I think architecture is sculptural by definition.
Or even if you see, in architectural history there's been literally a lot of sculpture carved into architecture.
I mean I work at projects at different scales.
I love doing architecture but obviously architecture is so time consuming that it takes periods of sometimes years.
So I also get involved in a lot of smaller projects like exhibitions commissions, that in a way allow me to have a smaller, small term, medium term kind of achievements, you know, because architecturally just are such elongated periods of time that are required.
That is a very hard profession to sustain, at least in the way that I like to do it.
Yeah, so this is one of the projects that I'll be completing this year.
It started about five years ago and it was a commission for an artist residency in upstate New York of reinterpretation of a temazcal, which is a pre-Hispanic sweat lodge.
That is also a ritual of rebirth.
So all of the mezcals are usually in a circular manner and they have like an attached chimney where you would heat the stones, and then the stones you bring into the other side you put on a pit, and This temazcal also acts as a piece of sort of infrastructure within the landscape.
That was something that I wanted to achieve, also kind of inspired by the industrial and agricultural landscape of off-state New York.
And I wanted to create a piece that almost felt like I had been there.
And so it's on the ledge of a pond and the water runs below.
So it works to control the level of the pond.
And on the back, it creates a waterfall that throws the water back into the river.
The mascals are usually dug in the ground, so you crawl into them.
This is a different version of it, where their part is being reinterpreted.
Obviously, it has a compressed door, but you don't need to crawl.
It's pitch black, but you can also control the light inside of it.
Music and sound is a very important part of the ritual of the Temazcal, so there's going to be a sound piece integrated into the ritual that will dictate all of the order of the different stages of the sound bath.
I don't think it's necessarily a political motive.
Also Temazcals are very present in today's, but it's definitely an interest of mine to look into the pre-Hispanic heritage of Mexico, even here where we are at the moment, which we're in centro and we're only a few blocks from the ceremonial center of Tenochtitlan, which was the pre-hispanic city of mexico, where everything sort of like sprawled from there.
I think yes, it's just drawing back inspiration from, from from the history it's.
It's something kind of vital and necessary.
You know when, when you're from here, also to understand you know your context, I guess.
Usually in architecture you work from a brief, there's a problem to be resolved.
So, somehow stepping out of that and working more in the abstract sculptural world, I've been able to begin to work more blindly, without necessarily defining what I'm, what I'm doing, but also having notions intuitively, of what I would like to spark.
The formal process of creation is both material, like an experimentation, a feeling.
I collect a lot of pieces.
I'm very taken by pieces that have a certain aura or that in a way, they communicate their usage or the time in themselves, like an old rock or an archaeological piece or some sort of tool.
And that's something that I like to also bring into my work this idea of something being a temporal, not from a defined moment in time.
In a way, it's a piece that is making you think of clues.
I like to think a lot of my work like it's a puzzle that somehow needs to be resolved.
And I think the longer the span in time, the broader chances for speculation there is.
Thank you.
I started working with concrete, I think it was 10 years ago.
I like it because of its versatility and it's also a material that is relatively fast to try things on.
But I also work a lot with aluminum and metal milling.
Somehow, again talking about the aura of primitivism that I think some of the concrete pieces intend to communicate, but then, at the same time, having these precise metallic aluminum components that bring in that that more futuristic side to them.
Where I really enjoy not being able to fully understand, like people not being able to fully understand how something is made.
Even in the show a lot of people were speculating whether it's I mean stone, which is something that I guess is a more obvious speculation of what it could be, but people were suggesting it could be metal or resin.
And I like that idea of people not being able to pin down what it is.
And sometimes with sandcast experiments as well, there's these layers of almost patination or aging.
Yes, I guess a successful piece for me is the one that triggers people into trying to resolve or identify the puzzle that is inherited in the pieces and the things that are only slightly being suggested in it.
So yes, I guess the piece that triggers you to try to figure out what it does or what it means.
But at the same time, it doesn't give you any of that.
