Artist Jorge Enrique Enjoys Fame in Europe While Working Anonymously in Wynwood
It feels lazy to call Miami-based artist Jorge Enrique a mixed media artist. He blends image and sculpture so thoroughly it confounds the mind. Look deeper at his three-dimensional works hanging off of walls or stretching up from the ground and you will find elements of photography hidden beneath brush strokes. The form of these objects (a descriptor he sometimes uses in the titles of his works) also hearken back to a period when he dabbled in the study of architecture.
The work of this Cuban-born artist is painting, sculpture and architecture at once. It began simply enough, looking out upon the concrete landscape of Wynwood, the Miami neighborhood where Enrique has resided at various studio spaces for the past 15 years. It began with photographing mundane objects like manhole covers and consideration of "mankind's history in asphalt." Then it turned to monoprints of the street. With just paper and ink, he and a group of assistants would "lift" images from the ground on giant, 40-inch roles of monoprint. Then he would wash some of it away, silkscreen it and wrap it around blocks of wood, completely re-imagining the urban landscape of Wynwood. Primary colors of blue and yellow offer highlight in the predominately black, white and gray works.
Wall Street Journal International
Waltman Ortega Fine Art presents “Metallic", a solo exhibition of works by Jorge Enrique. The new show is comprised of mixed media works on metal and paper and sculptural installation. The exhibition opens to the public on November 14, 3-7 p.m. and remains on view through December 16, 2015.
In the most recent works by Jorge Enrique, the idea of beauty is at the center of the artist’s practice. While Enrique’s artwork of the last two decades communicated the irony that minimalist and abstract works could actually represent the deconstruction of an unforgiving cacophonous urban environment, and the gritty “truth” of graffitied texts and images could not be trusted, beauty in Enrique’s work has always been present.
Wendy M. Blazier
Wendy M. Blazier is an art historian, writer and independent curator active in South Florida for more than 30 years as a museum curator, administrator and lecturer. A Detroit, Michigan native, Ms. Blazier served as Executive Director and Curator at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida 1979-1995 and as Senior Curator at the Boca Raton Museum of Art 2001-2012.
Drawn to the intellectual spareness of abstraction and conceptualism, Enrique nevertheless uses a wide range of media – drawing, painting, silkscreen, monoprints, layered lifted images, sculpture and installation. And Enrique’s practice is very much concerned with materials – shaping wood, sheet metal, paper, paint, epoxy, and resin into complex objects that undermine the ordinariness of their materials. These works are deliberate palimpsests - artworks whose history can be seen through the eroded exposure of under layers, visible by erasing, abrading, scraping and layering. The complex physicality of Enrique’s surfaces recalls ideas of age, decay, re-use, hidden images, and layers of meaning.
Enrique’s art both questions and embraces the theoretical dialogue of postmodernist works. His most recent works have a finished balance and a formalist elegance. With rigorous attention to line, symmetry, surface and texture, while experimenting with scale, serial repetition, color and reflection, these artworks encourage the viewer to revel in the layered, gestural complexity of paint and surface, the concept of beauty, the role of beauty in culture and society, and its presence in contemporary art.
Enrique’s series “Metallic” blurs the distinction between image and object, and between painting and sculpture. Enrique’s paintings and sculptures are the culmination of decades of making art about ideas. They are part of Enrique’s art history – steps along a trajectory from conceptual projects and text-object works to paintings that resonate as culturally loaded signs. The polished complexity of Enrique’s paintings and the linear, snaking nature of his sculptures set up a tension between object and void. Their repetition when installed in groups owes much to the influence of minimalist work from a half century ago.
These works explore the synthesis of opposites: controlled and spontaneous, rational and intuitive, represented and real, truth and fiction, permanent and ephemeral. They combine the purity of abstract visual experience with the primal exuberance of saturated color, glass-like glimmering surfaces, and flashes of metallic reflection.
For all their beauty – whether deeply subsumed, layered and abraded paintings or twisting, attenuated painted sculptures – these artworks offer the viewer more than meets the eye.
Jorge Enrique was born in Havana in 1960. He began his academic studies in Studio Art at the Alfred C. Glassell Jr. School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in, Houston. Enrique's work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States and is included in important permanent collections such as La Fondation Villa Datris Museum in Paris and L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (France) and the Bernard Magrez Cultural Institute in Bordeaux, and others. Jorge Enrique lives and works in Miami.
Wendy M. Blazier
Wendy M. Blazier is an art historian, writer and independent curator active in South Florida for more than 30 years as a museum curator, administrator and lecturer. A Detroit, Michigan native, Ms. Blazier served as Executive Director and Curator at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida 1979-1995 and as Senior Curator at the Boca Raton Museum of Art 2001-2012.
Anti-organic architectural considerations. Describing a body of work (four years in the making) from Miami-based artist Jorge Enrique is both a paradoxical and technically accurate exercise. Architecture is geared towards a slew of metaphoric tasks: a basic shelter, a functional work or play space, a haven for hermetic ritual, a temple for learning, or maybe a mere freestanding aesthetic experiment. The variances of architecture are, by their nature, reflections of the same kind of spontaneous, organic innovations often experienced by painters, dancers, musicians, and stage actors. In other words, architecture is seldom a cold, methodical series of calculations, measurements, numbers, permits, and ownership claims. But Enrique's work is neither an adherence to strict principles of sound logic, nor an embrace of a recent class of architectural bodies meant to mimic "natural" or "organic" elements.
Enrique's exposure to innovative architecture suggests he isn't a blood-drenched cynic or a battered victim of traditional structural values. He was educated at the Alfred C. Glassell Jr. School of Studio Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The museum, built in 1978 by S.I. Morris Associates (whose firm was responsible for such projects as The Houston Astrodome, One Shell Plaza, and the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston), is a reflective being all on its own. Its shimmering, mirrored exterior tiles bend light and curve space to see everything that surrounds it. The building, effectively, is a responsive thing. Jorge Enrique's exposure to these occurrences, these reflections, appears to have had a long-lasting impact on his practice as a visual artist. He absorbed the diverse external and internal spaces of Houston and later, Miami, translating the experience of urban construction and deconstructions into his early work. Paintings directly incorporating photographs of manhole covers, asphalt patterns, wire fences, and metal gratings were slathered in lacquer; sometimes, these paintings would enter three-dimensional space as rectangular pillars or blocks. With these more recent works, Enrique engages in angular gestures with more muted surface qualities. The lacquer coatings are gone, dark umber and soot black tones dominate the compositional planes versus yellows and primary blues, and the lack of such layered materials as found in his works from 2000 to 2012 are, ironically, more tangible.
Enrique's sculpture embodies the greatest level of advancement in the newer group of works. There is no doubt that drawing remains an important variable to the equation, but the presence of the structures resembling bent lines, zigzagging through the air, is the most direct challenge to conventional architectures. They are anti-organic, in that they pointedly do not try to be buildings looking like flowers, leaves, or even human genitals (countless skyscrapers and monuments have some sort of subconscious phallic reference, while Zaha Hadid's plan for the Qatari football stadium seems to resemble generous labial flaps). They are anti-architectural, in a strict sense that they do not satisfy any of the criteria as a shelter, dwelling, or congregational space. What these works are, though, are investigations into radicalized geometry; angles and permutations of linear space become less concrete constructions in non-linear space.
Cy Twombly, in one of his final interviews with Sir Nicholas Serota, noted that, "architecture is also landscape...I would have liked to have been an architect but I'm not good at mathematics." Jorge Enrique cites Twombly's 1994 triptych Untitled (Say Goodbye to Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) as his artistic watershed moment. The painting, itself, is a reference to Orpheus, the musical genius who traveled to and back from the reaches of the Underworld. On the physical surfaces of Twombly's epic works, linear space is acknowledged but flatly rejected as a vessel for expressive gesture. Enrique follows a similar path, most visible in his new sculpture. They are anti-organic architectural considerations, ideas formulated with an understanding of common spatial formalities. He objects to these as a conscious, intelligent, and engaging creative act.
Jorge Enrique was born in Havana in 1960. He emigrated to the United States in 1971, completing his BFA in Studio Art at the Alfred C. Glassell Jr. School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at venues in Paris, New York, Miami and Houston. Enrique's works have been shown at the Villa Datris Foundation in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (France), L'Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez in Bordeaux, Locust Projects (Miami), the Lawndale Art Annex (Houston), and the Coca-Cola Corporation Headquarters in Atlanta. Jorge Enrique lives and works in Miami.
articlesdart
ENRIQUE JORGE AND THE ART’RULES
by Amelie Colelli
If I was an art critic, I would see in the Jorge Enrique’work, something postmodernist. We can see in his work something from abstraction, something from conceptualism, something from formalism and also something from himself. Actually, he takes some elements in these artistic practices, and creates finally something new and personal.
Influenced by abstraction, this artist creates spaces strange to all visible things. They penetrate in the visitor’s spirit with their mythological evocations. The Labyrinth, mixed media on aluminium, is an example. In this work, the artist speaks about him and also gives us a mirror in which we could see our contradictions and our difficulty in findind a place in the life.
Influenced by formalism, Jorge ENRIQUE uses materials like a vehicle of soul. Here, there is something metaphysic, something which disappears from view, but which is an integral part of metallic surfaces abraded and scraped.
Actually, we have to say it : Jorge ENRIQUE paints on sheet metal with car paint, epoxy and resin. The Farewel Minautor is an example of this practice. The colors chosen move on an aluminium surface in a free and random way. They express the deeper layers of personality, an abolition of rational self-control.
The attraction for abstraction and formalism drives Jorge ENRIQUE to conceptualism. But if he gives importance to the idea behind the work, the art being a language for him, he doesn’t give up his appearance. There is a work on the materials, whether it is the paint or the support. Miami is his tank. He takes some metals, some textures of surface and some shapes. What lies below illustrates this experimental artistic practice. In a limited chromaticism (black, grey, white, red) and a calculated geometry, the artist realizes an imprint of the city.
Jorge ENRIQUE isn’t a young « up and comer ». We can see it easyly here. He is postmodernist because he knows the school rules. However, he distances from them in other singular things.
Because I am philosopher before being art critic, I see in his genius, something Kantian. Indeed, for Kant, the genius is the nature which gives his rules to the art. Jorge ENRIQUE doesn’t apply rules, but he produces rules. By being who he is, they are what they are. We have here a beautiful illustration of what are rules in Art.
Boom-Bang-Mai
(Bam Bam Magazine)
La galerie Olivier Waltman est heureuse d’annoncer la cinquième exposition personnelle de l’artiste cubainaméricain Jorge Enrique en France. « Par le passé, je me suis souvent référé à des matériaux industriels qui sont devenus une partie de mon vocabulaire visuel : l’acier, l’aluminium, le bitume et le béton sont les fondamentaux de mon environnement artistique. Dans un cadre urbain, ils font partie de notre quotidien, un nouvel espace naturel pour certains d’entre nous. J’incorporais des traces de notre environnement dans ma peinture, que je recouvrais de vernis ou de résine Epoxy, pour mieux composer avec la lumière et les reflets. Plus récemment, j’ai commencé à utiliser directement le métal dans mon travail. La surface de l’aluminium brille et produit ses propres reflets. La capacité de ce matériau à intégrer, tel un miroir, une image provenant de l’extérieur m’intéresse immensément. L’aluminium me permet de continuer à expérimenter cette voie avec une différence majeure, au plan plastique : dorénavant le reflet est à la fois le fond et la surface de l’image. » Jorge Enrique, mars 2015
Toutelaculture
Soyez libre, Cultivez-vous !
La galerie Olivier Waltman est heureuse d’annoncer la cinquième exposition personnelle de l’artiste cubain-américain Jorge Enrique en France. « Par le passé, je me suis souvent référé à des matériaux industriels qui sont devenus une partie de mon vocabulaire visuel : l’acier, l’aluminium, le bitume et le béton sont les fondamentaux de mon environnement artistique. Dans un cadre urbain, ils font partie de notre quotidien, un nouvel espace naturel pour certains d’entre nous. J’incorporais des traces de notre environnement dans ma peinture, que je recouvrais de vernis ou de résine Epoxy, pour mieux composer avec la lumière et les reflets. Plus récemment, j’ai commencé à utiliser directement le métal dans mon travail. La surface de l’aluminium brille et produit ses propres reflets. La capacité de ce matériau à intégrer, tel un miroir, une image provenant de l’extérieur m’intéresse immensément. L’aluminium me permet de continuer à expérimenter cette voie avec une différence majeure, au plan plastique : dorénavant le reflet est à la fois le fond et la surface de l’image. » Jorge Enrique, mars 2015
Wall Street Journal International
Jorge Enrique. Metallica. Paris, France
Jorge Enrique, Metallica, Technique mixte sur aluminium 30x30x4cm La galerie Olivier Waltman est heureuse d’annoncer la cinquième exposition personnelle de l’artiste cubainaméricain Jorge Enrique en France. "Par le passé, je me suis souvent référé à des matériaux industriels qui sont devenus une partie de mon vocabulaire visuel : l’acier, l’aluminium, le bitume et le béton sont les fondamentaux de mon environnement artistique. Dans un cadre urbain, ils font partie de notre quotidien, un nouvel espace naturel pour certains d’entre nous. J’incorporais des traces de notre environnement dans ma peinture, que je recouvrais de vernis ou de résine Epoxy, pour mieux composer avec la lumière et les reflets. Plus récemment, j’ai commencé à utiliser directement le métal dans mon travail. La surface de l’aluminium brille et produit ses propres reflets. La capacité de ce matériau à intégrer, tel un miroir, une image provenant de l’extérieur m’intéresse immensément. L’aluminium me permet de continuer à expérimenter cette voie avec une différence majeure, au plan plastique : dorénavant le reflet est à la fois le fond et la surface de l’image." Jorge Enrique, mars 2015 Jorge Enrique est né à la Havane en 1960. Il vit et travaille à Miami. Il a participe à de nombreuses expositions personnelles et collectives en Floride comme à l’étranger. Il est représenté par la galerie Olivier Waltman à Paris et à Miami.
The Scene (NBC)
NiteTalk
Born in Cuba, schooled in Texas, and heavily-collected in France (as well as around the rest of The Continent), visualist Jorge Enrique is undoubtedly the kinda cat who’s home right here in the MIA.
That he happens to be opening a solo show called "Barcode" in Wynwood’s wowsome Waltman Ortega Gallery coincident with this Second Saturday only makes the notion more so.
Niteside decided to get with the worldly local in advance of tomorrow’s Art Walk; here’s what he had to say.
What exactly is behind “Barcode”? "Barcode" is a chapter on the Urban D-Construction Series, where I’ve taken iconic symbols of our everyday urban reality and by manipulating and multiplying those images through photography, screens, prints, etc, I arrive to a "plastic rev-up minimalism", relying on a very controlled palette of color. The medium is usually acrylics, and inks on paper finished in plastic. Yeah I love plastic finishes, like George Carlin used to say “God created man so we could create plastic” -- sometimes I think he was right! ;-)
If you had but one single sentence to sum up the exhibit, what would it be?
"Barcode" is an extremely fresh, and manically/beautifully executed exhibit.
How ‘bout a single sentence to sum up the Urban D construction series altogether?
Things are not what they seem to be.
GLOW by Jorge Enrique at Waltman Ortega Fine Art
The exhibition is comprised of mixed media paintings and free-standing sculptures. This new body of work is a departure from the artist’s minimal and controlled palette of colors to the opposite side of the spectrum with bright glowing tonalities of the spray paint.
“In the past ten years I had reduced my color palette to a few colors and relied mostly on their tonality to do my work. I had also been working on sculptures of radical geometric form and usually finished them with one color or two at the most. In this project
I wanted to break away from this past as well as introduce some new applications of paint into the mix. The idea is to allow the geometric element to weave itself in and out from the paintings to the sculptures and back in a seamless dialog.
Jorge Enrique was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1960. He began his academic studies in Studio Art at the Alfred C. Glassell Jr. School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in, Houston. Enrique’s work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States and is included in important permanent collections such as La Fondation Villa Datris Museum in Paris and L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (France) and the Bernard Magrez Cultural Institute in Bordeaux, and others. Jorge Enrique lives and works in Miami.