Petroglyph Silver Earrings

Each earring is a long silver crescent, hammered thin and tapered to a point, with a procession of pre-Hispanic figures cut clean through the metal along its inner curve. Hunters and animals march down the blade in pierced silhouette, the openwork reading as dark shadow against the bright planished surface, so that the whole earring carries a fragment of rock-art frieze that swings and shifts as it is worn.

The pierced figures are the design. There is no applied ornament and no stone — the drama is entirely in the cut line and the hammered ground, a piece of carved petroglyph translated directly into wearable silver. It is the kind of disciplined, motif-driven object that marks Antonio Pineda's modernist instinct, taking an ancient Mexican source and reducing it to clean form and rhythm.

The pair is worked in 970 silver and struck with Pineda's Antonio-Taxco crown mark, the hallmark of the Taxco taller he ran through the postwar decades, where, as Stromberg records, master silversmiths executed his designs under his name. The matched crescents repeat the same figural frieze, and that frieze ties them to the arrowhead pendant designed alongside them.

Hung from simple ear-wires and built on a single carried idea, the earrings are Pineda treating the petroglyph as ornament — line and shadow drawn straight from the rock face into silver, and nothing more than the form requires.