This younger Mexican studio blends sculpture with structure

As a baby rising up in Mexico Metropolis, Carlos Matos typically hung out on the dwelling of his grandfather, architect Ernesto Gómez Gallardo, within the prosperous district of San Jerónimo. Constructed within the late Seventies, the brutalist Casa Möbius was ‘distanced from the concept of consolation, barely dysfunctional’, remembers Matos. ‘Even the bogs have been triangular. It was absurd.’ Regardless of its peculiar format, the home additionally provided ‘areas for each form of interplay’. It was a liveable provocation, prodding at what Matos calls ‘the boundaries between structure and sculpture.’ That boundary – blurred, probably out of date – has been central to his follow ever since.

Meet Carlos H Matos, the experimental younger Mexican architect

Matos’ work in Mexico Metropolis started in 2014, three years after he completed his diploma at London’s Architectural Affiliation (AA). That 12 months, together with two of his colleagues, he began a visiting programme for the AA known as Beton Machine, which was ‘all about experiments with concrete and monumental sculpture in Mexico,’ he says. For 4 years, they provided ‘a crash course’ on pre-Hispanic ruins, modernist abstraction, social-realist reliefs, and the whole lot in between, from Juan O’Gorman and Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli Museum to an intensive examine of Edward James’ surrealist backyard in Xilitla.

From 2016-2023, Matos explored these types via Tezontle, a studio based with Lucas Cantú. Collectively, they developed a singular language that was each natural and geometric, figurative and summary, primitive and futuristic. Since parting methods with Cantú, Matos has continued to develop his personal pursuits by making use of the tactile materiality of structure to his sculpture, and the anomaly of artwork to his buildings. For Casa Monte, accomplished in 2024 on the Oaxacan coast, Matos used huge concrete blocks, solid in situ, to construct a home like a half-ruined or half-built temple. His 2025 solo present at Mexico Metropolis gallery

Peana deployed resin, aluminium, concrete and metal in an elaborate tableau, equal elements builder’s workshop, petrified Zen backyard and alien storage. Different current initiatives embrace a temazcal (a pre-Hispanic sweat lodge) in upstate New York, and ongoing analysis for a forthcoming set up at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock Home in LA.

‘I’m all the time fascinated by the place issues are located in time, the query of “when is that this from”,’ says Matos, who prefers to think about ‘structure as a stage’ – playful, theatrical and resonant. His buildings are usually not only for habitation. They’re, like his grandfather’s home, ‘for each form of interplay’ – indeterminate borderlands the place, he says, ‘you may act out the stress between the long run and the previous’.