Presentation

Wall sculpture inspired by the ancient Mesoamerican tzompantli. Hand-carved in cedar wood and mounted on carbon-steel hardware, Neopantli reinterprets one of the most representative symbols of pre-Hispanic Mexico from a contemporary perspective. Conceived as a modular system, it can be installed individually or repeated to form larger-scale compositions.

Specifications

Design

Cristóbal Ramírez de Aguilar Ramírez

Year

2026

Origin

Handmade in Mexico.

Materials

Hand-carved cedar wood.

Carbon steel with a black finish.

Technique

Skull hand-carved by a master cabinetmaker specializing in sacred art. Hardware fabricated in carbon steel with a concealed fastening system.

Dimensions

40 × 40 × 13.5 cm (width × height × depth)

System

Modular piece for individual or serial installation.

Installation

Direct wall mounting using concealed hardware.

Use

Indoor.

Variations

Each piece is made by hand. The grain, tones, and natural characteristics of the wood, together with the hand-carving process, make every Neopantli a unique work.

Origin

What would a tzompantli look like if it had continued evolving for five hundred years?

Neopantli was born from that question. It does not seek to reconstruct an object from the past, but to imagine how it might have changed over time without losing what made it recognizable.

The piece takes the ancient skull walls of the Mesoamerican world as its point of departure and finds a second reference in Wall of Skulls, by Manuel Felguérez. Between them emerges a dialogue about memory, the transformation of symbols, and the way each era gives them new meaning.

Each skull is hand-carved in cedar wood by a master cabinetmaker specializing in sacred art, recovering a craft that shaped New Spanish sculpture for centuries. The wood retains its grain, knots, and natural variations so that the material itself can participate in the work. No two pieces are identical, just as no memory remains intact over time.

The skull rests on carbon-steel hardware whose cruciform geometry resolves the structure while proposing a second interpretation. Wood and steel, Mesoamerican tradition and the viceregal legacy, coexist within a single object as a reflection of the different cultural heritages that, far from replacing one another, ultimately shaped Mexican identity.

Conceived as a modular system, Neopantli can exist as an individual piece or be multiplied to form compositions at different scales, evoking the rhythm of the ancient tzompantli through a contemporary language.

Rather than representing death, Neopantli proposes a reflection on permanence. Symbols survive when they are capable of transforming without forgetting what gave rise to them.