Isabel & Ruben Toledo
To enter the loft of Isabel and Ruben Toledo is to ascend into a Borgesian sense of infinitude.
Books, photographs, prints and mementos spill out of shelves and across tables. Vines and potted plants grow in the corners of a byzantine series of rooms that are at once a home and an atelier. The history of New York, in its most self-flattering mode, lives in countless objects: book collections gifted by Bill Cunningham, Klaus Nomi and other friends; a drafting table from the illustrator Antonio Lopez. Collectively, the objects would signify style and status were they not at the heart of the fairy tale embodied in Isabel and Ruben themselves. With an intensity that borders on obsession, their love for each other is the dominant presence in whichever room they inhabit and is the subtext of whatever idea they address. It’s a love that shifts and reshapes itself constantly, making a h...
