11 x 15 inches, edition of 25, 2022, $450
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At the foundation of my work is a specific social message composed of elements based
on memory, current events, and personal experience. The social message is rooted in folklore narratives, the economy of the Americas, and the crossing from illegal immigrant to naturalized citizen. My work thrives when I am researching historical and current facts and fiction that define the Americas. In creating revised accounts, I disrupt the viewer’s perception of authenticity in order to generate cultural critique. I utilize iconography to address identity, labor, politics, and migration. The mixed references do not lead toward a particular resolution, rather point toward a bold imagination.
I avoid presenting predictable storylines. Inspired by Magical Realism, it is imperative that history is distorted, new characters are born, and that first, second, and third hand records are amended. The evidence of the hand, chance, tool, and surface, and the alchemy of
printmaking personalize the translation of content. It is through this practice that unpredictability may be achieved. I use line as a measure of time and human trajectory, as well as a mark-making utensil. Another impulse is to start with emotion to investigate what comes after the analysis of culture and make work not solely bound by figuration and narrative.
In Academy as Potentiality, Irit Rogoff reminds me, “that project is well underway and in
its wake comes the permission to approach the study of culture from the most oblique of angles, to occupy ourselves with the constitution of new objects of study that may not have been previously articulated for us by existing fields.” I ask myself: how can I set myself up to shake off instinct and reason to go beyond what I know? For instance, when the continents are erased from a map of trade routes, the resulting lines become a symbol, language, or code. Given that all map projections distort the surface, the exact retracing of these lines is impossible. I find beauty and mystery in that.
Enrique Figueredo is a Venezuelan-American artist who immigrated from South America
at a young age. Enrique follows closely the Venezuelan diaspora and he spends most of his
time trying to make sense of Latin America–United States relations. He is the recipient of the VCUarts Fountainhead Fellowship in Painting and Printmaking (2019-2020), and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Award (2019). Enrique earned his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in 2019, where his work is in the Zimmerli Art Museum collection. In addition to his artistic practice, he is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Print at The University of Texas at Austin.
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