Tezontle artists Carlos H. Matos and Lucas Cantu
Mexico City, Mexico
Nov 20 - Dec 10, 2017
Artist's Statement
Carlos H Matos and Lucas Cantu founded Tezontle in 2014. Tezontle is collaborative studio in Mexico City’s Centro Historico. Tezontle uses sculpture to bring the disciplines of architecture and art installation together into one workshop.
Tezontle identifies with Mexico’s pre-hispanic heritage and the abstract work of the Mexican modernists of the mid-20th Century. The studio works by curating found objects with self made ones in a process of generating innovative formal and material narratives. This working method is independent of scale. When scale becomes irrelevant, the sculptural becomes the architectural and vice versa.
Amongst other projects Tezontle is currently working on a variety of small scale sculpture commissions; an in-situ installation at Richard Neutra's VDL House in LA as part of the ´Tu casa es mi casa´ residency program; a mixed use sculptural garden in the caribbean town of Tulum; the museography for Archivo´s MXCD:02 exhibition about Mexico City´s history through objects that will open in October 2017 and a set of concrete living units designed along Bahia de Guadalupe in the coast of Guerrero. Tezontle will participate in 2017 edition of UNTILED Art Fair in Miami Beach in a booth presented by PEANA which will be a continuation of their solo exhibition 'Piedras Vivas' in Monterrey, MX.
Carlos and Lucas also teach and are co-founders of the Architectural Association´s experimental concrete workshop ´AAVS Las Pozas´ that takes place every summer in the Huasteca Jungle and serves as a research platform that aims to forge links between craft and culture in the town of Xilitla.
IG - @tezontle_studio