In the sub-tropical forest at Xilitla (pronounced Hilitla), in Mexico, there’s a surreal garden with buildings in stone and cement. There’s a doorway that leads to absolutely nowhere or rather, where it was meant to lead to, although it hadn’t been built in time and the building was thus incomplete or merely invisible to us. Something our eyes were not able to see beyond that door. There’s also a stairway that climbs up high, yet it never actually goes anywhere. It does nevertheless take us that little bit nearer the heavens, and it allows us to change our perspectives. It might just be attempting to tell us something without openly saying so.

These are the Gardens of Las Pozas, built by Edward James (from 1962 to the year of his death in 1984). Google defines him as one of the most eccentric men of the Twentieth century. Born into an upper-middle class British family and educated in the finest schools of his country, upon reaching adulthood, James grew close to the environs of art and was fascinated, above all, by the Surrealist movement. He became a collector and a patron of some of the most important artists of the movement: Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, for example. Upon the end of his marriage, he decided to head to America, to California, where he encountered a mystical community who took him down to Mexico. Nothing of course happens by mere chance, and it was there that Edward James found the right place to express himself completely. He discovered some land towards the south of the country, immersed in the wilderness of Nature, and it was there that he created an orchid garden with exotic animals. However, after a terrible and highly unusual frost had entirely destroyed the garden, he dedicated himself to the realisation of yet another grand project: the sculpture garden at Las Pozas – a construction of arches, spires, columns, as well as stone and cement stairways in the midst of a thick and lush vegetation.

At Las Pozas the atmosphere is full of enchantment and in a sort of suspended stupor. “The building of one’s house should never really stop. Nature will see to it and complete it”, claimed James. And indeed, as a matter of fact, even though he had dedicated over twenty years to it, when he died it appeared before everybody else as if it was still incomplete and yet willing to welcome new constructions and buildings.

Las Pozas is now part of the Fundación Pedro y Elena Hernández, A.C. It is a sort of a Shangri-La, a Surrealist Garden of Eden, a maze of suspended and broken pathways, terraces overlooking swathes of nothing, natural pools of water and waterfalls. Where everything is halfway into creation or, at least it seems so, and where what is actually material mingles with what might be invisible. At Las Pozas, the world does not work along our normal logical mindset, but it follows our own spirit. “Surrealism” – as once said Odilon Redon, considered the greatest representative of pictorial symbolism – “is the logical state that is visible to what we have that is ‘invisible’ for us. Let us release our convictions and immerse ourselves in this terrestrial dream that we may in future behold before us.”