FEMSA Estancia – Casa Luis Barragán presents up to the first solo exhibition in Latin America by renowned French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada. Entitled Double Skin, the show presents a set of new works commissioned especially for the occasion. Yto Barrada worked for this project with various aspects of the work and life of Luis Barragán,
mainly with the architect's strong interest in magic and the enigma –understood as crucial elements of architecture–, as well as with his use of formal and symbolic tension between opposing concepts such as opacity/clarity, desire/restriction and opening/closure.
In the studio of the house, Yto Barrada will cover the walls with a second skin: wallpaper from the Paste Papers series (2019). This is based on paste paper designs that the artist found in different books belonging to Luis Barragán's personal library. In this way, intimacy remains, in a certain way,
exposed, and this gesture of transposition becomes a metaphor for the multiple ambiguities that are implicit in Barragán's life and work. In the rooms of the house, there are the pieces entitled Practice Pieces (2019), made with hand-dyed silk velvets. Inspired by the color sampling systems used for the conservation of textiles, these pieces refer to the production of natural dyes with organic materials —cochineal, indigo and
tyrian purple, among others—techniques that have existed since ancient times, both in Mexico and Morocco.
Finally, in the library of the house you will find the short film Horsehair, Confetti and Rice (2019), a piece of experimental cinema with an emphasis on materials and textures, projected directly onto a yellow monochrome made in Barragán's workshop in 1965. hallucinatory quality of the film also alludes to imaginary
historical art from Mexico and Morocco. In this way, the exhibition pays homage to the importance of Moroccan vernacular architecture and material culture as strong influences on Barragán and his friend and collaborator Mathias Goeritz. In a broad aspect, Double Skin becomes Yto Barrada's latest project that stems from his interest in the history of architecture and modernism.
The exhibition will be open to the public until September 8, 2019 at CASA LUIS BARRAGÁN located at Gral. Francisco Ramírez 12-14
Col. Extension Daniel Garza Mexico City..
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