Sofía Táboas: an intrigue hides in the garden

It contained what a well-achieved garden should contain: nothing less than the entire universe.

— Luis Barragán*

The garden has always been an intermediary space, a tamed exterior. Like a Persian carpet, it is the way nature is shaped to fit within constructed spaces. The garden is that almost-exterior, almost-world, almost-everything.

This liminal space is the ground where an ageless dialogue between two of its main experts takes place: Luis Barragán and Sofía Táboas. The former, an architect who sowed gardens teeming with randomness, and the latter, an artist intrigued by the boundary between inside and outside; together, they engage in an ageless conversation surrounded by a sea of greens. This is precisely the seed of Sofía Táboas' dia cronía exhibition at the renowned architect’s Casa Ortega, a series of paintings and sculptures exhibited for a few days in the extensive gardens of the house, a meeting of colors in that mysterious outdoor-indoor space.

Táboas has been engaging in a dialogue with Barragán for a long time through the chromatic study of the architect's major works in Mexico City and its surrounding areas: Casa Estudio Barragán, Casa Prieto López, Capilla de las Capuchinas, Cuadra San Cristóbal, and Casa Gilardi. During her visits to each of them, the artist focused on the iconic use of color. Through her observation, Táboas shows how color has taken on its own dimension, echoing from work to work, from house to house, and from the surface of the walls. Moreover, her chromatic study reveals how Barragán built his own universes in each project, allowing for increasing saturation over the years. Táboas turned her painterly gaze to the passage of time on these surfaces, on how the sun imprints time on the palette's variation.

In dia cronía there is an open reflection on space and time, as the paintings and sculptures became temporary residents of the garden. A series of unexpected metallic structures, planes of saturated colors, and almost transparent color forms break the continuity – a set of ten chromatic interruptions by Táboas. To visit them, one must traverse the garden, climbing up and down stairs, peeking into corners to discover the works amid the carefully overflowing gardens of Casa Ortega. Barragán's gardens are not meant to end but to be infinite. The architect was inspired by Japanese gardens that have the quality of erasing their boundaries from view, appearing to merge with the landscape.

Finding the limits proves to be a challenging task, an active search, as these gardens are not intended to end but rather strive to be endless. However, the walls can be encountered where the physical limits of the garden are found, those vertical elements of colors other than green that rise in contrast to the surroundings. If there's one thing that defines Barragán's architecture, it's the encounter / contrast / dialogue / break between two moments: the constructed work (straight lines, saturated colors, decision, rigidity, certainty) and the garden (curves, greens, softness, freedom). Order and uncontrollable chance. Here also lies Táboas' timeless dialogue with the architect, as her work represents the meeting of two moments: the constructed and the unpredictable.

This encounter between opposing impulses defines Táboas' series of paintings that appear in the garden, dressed as exterior sculptures for the occasion, with a metal structure that allows them to stand. The works bring together those two moments of a given structure and random play. The intricate color surfaces were constructed with a rigorous system. Their form corresponds to the grid of different anonymous windows, all from Mexico City, architectural elements that the artist has been collecting over the years.

To create the paintings, the structures of these found windows are traced onto wooden sheets and translated into a series of cut lines to form different pieces that are assembled like a puzzle. Curves, straight lines, and diagonals, these pieces follow a very precise assembly system. The artist paints, on each piece separately, oil parallel lines based on the tones found in Barragán's houses. These wooden pieces are rearranged once painted, and their final form is a surprise.

On the newly scratched surface in a thousand different directions a chromatic harmony is felt, except for one element that stands out: one of the pieces is painted with the colors of the neighbor's house. Here lies another space for chance within the work. The artist conducted a very detailed study of the architect's color palettes but also of the area where the houses are currently located. That strange color that doesn't belong to the set emerges in the work in a section where even the paint becomes denser and covers the wood completely. That color from the neighbor's house represents the real world, chance, the uncontrollable, that which exceeds the limits of what one person has built. The evanescent idea is juxtaposed with tangible reality.

In other corners of Casa Ortega's garden, there are sculptures that subtly intrude and interrupt. They are brass structures reminiscent of the painted windows. In these rectangular metal grids, there is an intriguing mass of glass. This transparent – though not overly so – object, light and heavy at the same time, is what holds the gaze and disrupts the form. A glass slug, perhaps, or a tongue? A sustained flow. Its organic form contrasts with the linear metal that supports it.

Further on, two long brass rods also gleam among the trees, so thin and organic that they appear to be strings. They are very simple objects: the union of an immobile vertical supporting an organic form that descends in a halted twist. The suspended element is an accumulation of blown glass that weighs, rotates, and shines. Thus, the artwork reveals the magical ability of art to sustain imminent collapse.

This is when the second dialogue between Táboas and Barragán is articulated, it is a question about the materiality of blown glass that so intrigued the architect and led him to place spheres in strategic locations in all his houses. It is the glass that summons them to continue the dialogue, that great intrigue-turned-material, which is both liquid and solid at the same time.

That substance never stops flowing, accumulating at the base of the very old windows. Dense, it is no longer transparent, no longer allows one to see through. Thin, it becomes imperceptible. It is uncomfortable and strange. Glass seems like an almost living entity; perhaps the blower's breath imparts to it a body and a certain will. In the face of the glass's expectation – a transparent, homogeneous, invisible sheet expected on a window’s surfaces – Táboas places nearly cellular organic formations of colors that do not allow one to see the other side and that hold a particular intrigue.

There, hanging in a garden that is almost a house, almost architecture, these blown and pigmented color accumulations offer a bit of intrigue and a revelation at the same time. As infinite inhabitants of these outdoor sculptures, will these blown glasses continue moving downward, until they melt upon touching the ground, and ultimately fuse with the garden?

Translated to English by Sebastián Antón-Ojeda

— Carolina Magis Weinberg

*: Pritzker Prize speech, June 3, 1980. available at https://arquine.com/el-discurso-de-luis-barragan/