Elena & Tomás Vargas

Elena restores textiles for a living — Navajo blankets, colonial embroidery, ceremonial cloth — and Tomás throws pots in their garage that end up in Santa Fe galleries and on their own dinner table. They didn't set out to collect art. They set out to make things, and somewhere along the way recognized the same impulse in someone else's hands.
Elena found Ingrid Solheim's work through a museum colleague. Tomás found it on his own, at a gallery in Taos, where he touched the frame thinking the piece was ceramic. It wasn't. It was paint — paint built up in ridges that cast shadows, that held weight, that did what he spends his days trying to make clay do.
Their adobe home on the east side of Santa Fe now holds two AEVART works: a Solheim impasto piece above the kiva fireplace, its cool grey-blue tones in quiet conversation with the warm plaster walls, and a Tanaka minimalist painting in Elena's studio — what she calls "the quietest thing in a very noisy room." The paintings don't decorate their home. They live in it.