Mask-Pendant Necklace with Turquoise and Amethyst

A silver face, small and impassive, sits at the center of this necklace and gathers the whole composition around it. From that mask the design radiates outward through dense scrollwork set with turquoise and amethyst, the blue-green stones and the violet ones arranged so that neither color dominates. This is the signature vocabulary of Matilde Poulat, known by the trademark MATL, in which a Mexican devotional and folk sensibility is built into jewelry through pierced silver, colored hardstone, and a strict frontal symmetry. The pendant reads as an object to be looked at directly, its ornament organized around a single held gaze.

The construction depends on layering. Scrolls of silver curl and interlock across the surface, and the stones are bezel-set within that openwork so that light passes through the gaps between elements. Turquoise carries opacity and a matte, earthy weight, while faceted amethyst introduces transparency and a cooler register, and Poulat's designs typically balance the two so that color functions structurally rather than as scattered accent. Small silver beads and drops finish the lower edge, adding rhythm and a slight downward movement when the pendant hangs. The frontal mask, a recurring motif in MATL work, connects the piece to a long Mexican tradition of the face as a devotional and protective image, here abstracted into a calm, stylized emblem rather than a portrait.

Poulat trained as a painter and designer at the San Carlos Academy before opening her shop in 1934, and her jewelry is best understood as the work of an artist who came to silver through composition and color rather than through the Taxco workshop lineage. The name MATL, a form of an Aztec word for water, was registered as a trademark, number 142093, and appears across her jewelry and decorative objects. Her approach stood apart from the austere geometry associated with much Taxco modernism: where designers such as Spratling or Pineda often reduced form to sculptural mass, Poulat embraced density, ornament, and a saturated palette drawn from Mexican popular and religious art. After her death in 1960, her nephew Ricardo Salas continued the MATL designs, and the marks used across these decades (script and etched forms, some carrying the registration number) allow the workshop's long production to be sorted chronologically, though a given mark records when a stamp was in use rather than the exact year an individual object was made.

Within a collection of the Mexican silver renaissance, a MATL mask-pendant necklace documents a strand of the movement that ran alongside, not behind, the geometric modernism of the Taxco School. It shows how a painter's understanding of color and symmetry could be translated into silver and hardstone, and how devotional imagery entered modern Mexican jewelry without being reduced to souvenir folklore. The piece records Poulat's particular fusion of ornamental density and controlled composition, a manner distinctive enough that later Salas production and other makers continued to work in its idiom.