Turquoise V Necklace

This necklace shows Héctor Aguilar working in one of his most characteristic registers, the multi-strand chain resolved to a single stone-set pendant, and it makes a useful counterpart to his heavier link jewelry. Rather than the massive interlocking forms for which the Taller Borda is best known, the design gathers several supple strands of small articulated silver segments into a converging V, from which a framed oval of blue-green turquoise hangs as a drop. The turquoise, set within a scrolled and beaded silver mount, provides the single note of saturated color against the cool, uniform sheen of the metal, so that the whole design leads the eye downward to the stone. It is a quieter, more feminine construction than the architectural bracelets, and it demonstrates that Aguilar's structural thinking extended to lighter, more fluid forms as readily as to bold ones.

The engineering is characteristically sound. The multiple strands, each built of small repeated links, drape independently and move against one another, giving the piece a liquid flexibility that a single heavy chain could not, and the pendant's beaded and volute-framed bezel echoes the granulation and scrollwork that recur throughout the workshop's jewelry. The Taller Borda's almost pure silver, softer and more reflective than sterling, lends the strands their warm hand-finished luster, and the turquoise cabochon, plainly polished and generously proportioned, is allowed to carry the design's color unaided. As an object to wear, the converging strands distribute weight evenly and settle naturally at the base of the throat, focusing attention on the drop, which is exactly where the design intends it.

Placed within the Taxco silver renaissance, the necklace reflects the movement's central premise: that handwrought silver, disciplined by strong form and paired with native stone, could constitute a serious modern decorative art. Turquoise carried a particular resonance in this setting, a stone with deep pre-Columbian associations in Mexican material culture, and its use here connects the piece, however quietly, to the broader modernist project of reclaiming indigenous materials for a contemporary idiom. Aguilar founded the Taller Borda on the Plaza Borda in Taxco and directed it until its closing in 1962, and Morrill records that the workshop's powerfully designed silver was highly desirable when produced in the forties and fifties and has remained timeless in its appeal. A turquoise-set pendant necklace belongs to that body of work as an example of the softer, more lyrical side of the shop's range.