In this series of photographs Joaquín Bérchez offers a critical and visual reading of some episodes of the artistic production of Manuel Tolsá (Énguera, Valencia, 1757 - Mexico City 1816), sculptor and architect active in Mexico in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Unrivaled artist in the fragile scenario of New Spain, Tolsá is the undisputed protagonist of a viceregal city that looks in the cosmopolitan mirror of the Europe of the Enlightenment and chooses a language of refined classicism for its new buildings and monumental avenues.

Before our eyes, peculiar classic environments parade, with sparkling fragments of stucco and moldings, architectural orders surprised in the dense silence of the walls, facades and domes portrayed against the background of today's Mexico, loggias and stairs immersed in an almost hypnotic glacial aura, all aspects that testify to the exceptional quality of the Valencian artist's works and, at the same time, the photographer's rare ability to reveal their plastic values to recreate completely new images.

Joaquín Bérchez is also an architectural historian, lecturer at the University of Valencia (1992-2010) and at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous Spanish cities and in various international locations including the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute in New York, the Palladio Museum in Vicenza, the University of Palermo, the Real Academia de España in Rome, the Colegio de Minería of Mexico City, the Ducal Palace of Camerino and the Museu de Arte Popular in Lisbon. Since 2003, his photographs illustrate the covers of our magazine “Annali di architettura”.