A vision in tiny pieces

Guadalupe Prieto, the flamboyant young chef of a trendy new Tijuana restaurant, was trapped in bumper-to-bumper taxi traffic not long ago, so she darted down a quiet, leafy side street. And suddenly she saw it.

An enormous mosaic of a tree of life reared up from the sidewalk, its sinuous branches embracing a storefront. Prieto stopped her car and stared in amazement.

The life-size mosaic tree, with its warm green and orange tiles, could have sprung from the imagination of Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It might have been a fragment of one of the surreal Barcelona tile mosaics by the great Catalan modernist, Antoni Gaudi. For Prieto, it was exactly the kind of arresting visual style she was seeking for the interior of a nouvelle cuisine restaurant she was about to open with her sister.

“I knew I wanted this artist,” Prieto said.

The designer turned out to be Tijuana mosaic artist Aida Valencia. She is the creative force behind Casa Valencia, one of a new wave of Tijuana artisan workshops reinterpreting Mexico’s traditional crafts with a more contemporary visual language. Like a growing number of the city’s artisans, Valencia, 45, works both sides of the border, tiling murals in kitchens, gardens and bars from San Diego to Ensenada and filling commissions for clients as far north as L.A.

One of Valencia’s designs, a lapis lazuli-hued mosaic fireplace laced with traces of gold, graces a house in tony Rancho Penasquitos in San Diego County. Another, a garden installation in Solano Beach, is a ceramic mural of a soaring sun and sky that spills from a burbling fountain to the patio floor and onto the wooden garden door. A swirling pattern of swordfish, starfish and seahorses is being painstakingly pieced together in the Casa Valencia workshop for a client’s wet bar in Rosarito. The design is emerging in the vibrant aquas and subtle pastels of the sea, with clam shells in shades of sand and salmon and sinuous sea grasses in wet-hued greens.

Valencia has often been compared to Gaudi, even before she was familiar with his famous outdoor mosaics in Barcelona. “A friend of mine brought me a book of Gaudi’s work from Barcelona, to show me,” Valencia said. “He said I was copying everything. I began to buy books myself, to open my mind to other people’s artistic styles and see the possibilities.”

One of Casa Valencia’s most mind-blowing designs is a table covered with what looks like the flattened remnants of a Victorian tea party. The mosaic is “set” with old floral plates and teacups provided by friends. To create the illusion, Valencia carefully cuts away the porcelain backing of the plates, leaving a surface thin enough to be laid, like flat tile, into an imaginary place setting. Flat teacup silhouettes, decorated with roses and other flowery motifs, are also cut out from recycled chinaware. Imaginary silverware is created by cutting knives, forks and spoons from old mirrors. A complete set includes painted vintage chairs reupholstered with peacock blue velvet and ornamented with glass tile insets. The result -- a visually hypnotic Mad Hatter’s tea party with hints of Julian Schnabel and Judy Chicago -- is something Casa Valencia can’t keep in stock.

Valencia did her first tea-party table for a San Diego woman who brought in the few plates that remained from a beloved antique family set and asked if they could dream up a tabletop design incorporating them. Valencia, a San Diego-born U.S. citizen who has lived in Tijuana most of her life, began her business in 1996. In those days, she was making decorative painted furniture, and she asked a Tijuana construction worker to show her how to set tile. She experimented by making several tile tabletops with designs copied from the art of Miro. Soon, an old friend, Brenda Parra, offered to be her business administrator and found she couldn’t resist pitching in on mosaics. Valencia and Parra became partners, and began getting commissions from local tourist hotels and restaurants.

“Aida is very creative, and I have a lot of faith in her big ideas,” Parra, 39, said. “I had money, and she didn’t. But she had tremendous creativity.”

Since Valencia is bilingual and bicultural, it was easy to expand into a cross-border enterprise. She and Parra built a showroom in a front wing of her parents’ Tijuana home, and clients from California began to stop in and order commissions. Soon, they were in demand on both sides of the border.

A visit to the Casa Valencia studio is a kaleidoscopic experience: mosaics of suns and moons stretch across the walls, and visitors can watch assistants piece together their commissions in the workroom in back. Valencia’s German shepherd, Mailo, suns himself in the courtyard, and a playful German shepherd puppy, Dylan, follows visitors around the showroom.

Valencia has traveled to Ravenna, Italy, to learn classical mosaic techniques. She has become an artful mimic of the floor mosaics of ancient Rome and Greece, and enjoys borrowing from pop culture design fads. And some of her designs are pure whim. The tree of life is a traditional Mexican design for rustic terra cotta candelabras. To give the mosaic tree its naturalistic feel, Valencia dug up an old tree trunk and its roots from the yard and secured it to the storefront, tiling over it. It took her four months to create the tree, but it was worth it. The tree mosaic has become the studio’s calling card, pulling in a steady stream of visitors who happen upon the showroom, just south of Tijuana’s central Aguascalientes Boulevard. The work Casa Valencia ended up creating for Prieto’s restaurant, the Casa Magnolia, is as lovely and unconventional as Guadalupe Prieto herself. Using tiles, hammered metal and even beads, the studio created a series of pillars throughout the restaurant that could be read as tree trunks, tentacles, or vaguely erotic forms. Tiles adorn the walls, the entrance, even a separate wooden side door that is the exclusive Casa Magnolia entrance for small children. The encrusted decorative columns are fittingly innovative for a restaurant that is pioneering such platos nuevos as the Crepa Moctezuma, a truly imperial repast consisting of a crepe stuffed with sirloin tenders and smothered with Mexico’s indigenous huitlacoche sauce.

“We wanted to create something that would make the restaurant distinctive, intriguing,” Valencia said. “How people see the pillars depends on their sensibility. Everyone says the first one is like a rumba or a samba, somebody dancing and inviting you to enter. The pillar by the bar is shiny glass tile, festive, inviting you to get a drink and have a good time.”

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Casa Valencia

Casa Valencia is located at Gobernador Ibarra 9825-A, Colonia America, Tijuana. From the U.S., dial 011-52664-686-1310, or e-mail tocava96@telnor.net.