Humberto Spíndola

Humberto Spíndola proposes intervening in the architecture of Luis Barragán with his installations fashioned from traditional Mexican colored tissue paper, known as papel de china or papel picado. The installations seek to reconstitute the dialogue between the painter Jesús Reyes Ferreira, who gave his palette of colors to the work of Luis Barragán, and the architecture of the Mexican master. The author suggests that this dialogue, which resulted in Barragán's use of color in his architecture, was based on the use of tissue paper, the material on which Chucho Reyes painted his extensive oeuvre. In his unusual work, Spíndola approaches tissue paper through the traditional Mexican handicraft techniques employed in the creation of decorative paper and piatas, using noble, acid- and pigment-free materials of more recent manufacture. This book is the catalogue of the exhibition of Humberto Spíndola's interventions in the Casa Luis Barragán and other houses designed by the architect. It contains essays on Spíndola's work by distinguished art and architecture critics Jorge Alberto Manrique, Lily Kassner, and Miquel Adrià. In the six works created for this occasion, the lightness, color, and mobility of tissue paper interact with the light, airiness, and spaciousness of Barragán's architecture. In a contemporary dialogue, Spíndola has drawn on his academic training in the social sciences to widen his historical research into Mexico paper crafts, seeing the relationship between Chucho Reyes and Barragán as part of a larger history of paper and architecture, from pre-Hispanic amate paper to the minimalism of Barragán.