Overlapping Spiral Coils Bracelet

The bracelet is organized from a simple premise carried out with unusual density: silver wire coils into compact spirals, then those spirals are joined into a broad band that reads as both pattern and structure. Its old linear Los Castillo signature, design number 449, and pre-Eagle marking place it within the workshop’s early 1940s production, before the later national assay system became a regular part of Taxco silver marking. At 6 3/4 inches long and 1 3/8 inches wide, with a hook closure, it has the scale of a substantial wrist ornament rather than a narrow chain. The dealer record’s description of it as thick and heavy is consistent with the visual force of the design: the bracelet gathers silver into repeated rounded masses without relying on stones, enamel, or applied imagery.

Each spiral begins as a tight center and expands outward in concentric turns, so that the surface seems to pulse across the wrist. The units are not arranged in a rigid grid. Larger and smaller coils interlock, press against one another, and vary the edge of the bracelet, giving the band a controlled irregularity. That effect matters. The bracelet uses repetition, but it avoids mechanical sameness. Light catches on the rounded wire and darkens in the channels between turns, making the surface active even though the vocabulary is limited to silver, curve, and join. The hook closure keeps the mechanism direct and visible, in keeping with an object whose ornament is inseparable from its construction.

Los Castillo was founded in Taxco in 1939 by Antonio Castillo with his brothers Justo and Jorge and his cousin Salvador Terán, after Antonio’s experience in William Spratling’s Taller de Las Delicias. Hougart records the firm as an influential design and manufacturing enterprise, and notes its later reputation for experimentation with sterling jewelry, married metals, enamel, feather inlay, and other specialized lines. This bracelet belongs to an earlier moment in that history, before the workshop became closely identified with some of those later material innovations. Morrill and Berk note that Los Castillo, like several important Taxco talleres, used stamped design or inventory numbers and that, for the most part, smaller numbers tend to indicate earlier pieces. Design number 449 should not be treated as an exact date, but in combination with the pre-Eagle mark and old signature it supports the object’s placement in the workshop’s formative 1940s vocabulary.

The design is modern without needing a machine aesthetic. Its spirals recall ancient and popular forms only in the broadest formal sense, but the bracelet does not depend on a specific archaeological citation. Its strength lies in the way a repeated hand-formed module becomes a modern surface, dense, rhythmic, and bodily. Within the Mexican silver renaissance, such objects show how Taxco workshops developed modern design through the disciplines of the taller: drawing, forming, joining, finishing, and adapting an idea to the moving body. This bracelet is a particularly clear early Los Castillo statement, one in which the workshop’s later appetite for invention is already present, concentrated in wire, weight, and rhythm.