Matchstick Necklace

A fan of slim silver bars splays across the front of this collar, each one tipped at its lower end with a small rectangle of black obsidian, so the necklace reads as a row of struck matches laid edge to edge around the throat. The "matchstick" is one of the most reductive ideas in Taxco silver, rhythm and interval where the school's work usually ran to flowers and figures, and it shows the sculptural modernism Antonio Pineda pursued further than most of his contemporaries.

The bars lengthen and splay wider toward the center, so the row deepens into a graduated fan and sits flat against the collarbone. They hang from a simple chain of curved silver links, the plain suspension throwing all the weight of the design onto the repeated bar and its dark cap. The effect is built from the discipline of the repeat, bright metal against a broken line of obsidian, rather than from any applied ornament.

The necklace carries Pineda's marks, including the Jewels by Antonio signature used around 1949 to 1953 and the Antonio-Taxco crown, with the inventory code YY436, the YY prefix designating a necklace in the workshop numbering recorded by Stromberg. The obsidian, a volcanic glass quarried in Mexico and worked there since pre-Hispanic times, is set into the end of each bar, pairing strict modern form with an ancient native material.

Built entirely around one repeated element, it is Pineda treating a necklace as small sculpture, line and light and dark stone, and nothing it does not need.