Mixed-media artist Eduardo Enrique on his incisive artworks
Fetish gear and antique tableware branded with Nike logos make up just some of Eduardo Enrique’s incisive commentaries on consumerism and globalisation today
Flanking the gates of Santo Domingo’s Chinatown in the Dominican Republic are two stone lions, weather‑beaten and ornately detailed, their jaws hinged open in an intimidating growl. The day artist Eduardo Enrique visited, however, a plastic bottle had been jammed between one of the pair’s teeth. Maybe someone was waiting for the garbage truck to come, maybe someone was too lazy to dump it in the bin. But there it was, grandeur defaced by a bottle. “It went from being something really sacred to being a cartoon character,” he says. “This cultural accident—the vandalism of an object of high culture by somebody who had no idea [about its meaning—was a perfect example of ] globalisation gone wrong.”
For an artist who has dedicated his practice to interrogating our fetishistic relationships to brands, commodities and consumerism, Enrique knew in that instant that no artwork he could fashion would ever be as powerful as that mundane masterpiece of absurdity. In fact, Enrique’s work thrives on the recontextualisation of the mundane, which is exactly how his commentary on capitalist consumerism and globalisation is so pointed. In 2019, he started an anonymous Instagram account called Dick Worldwide, featuring luxury bags and shoes transformed into the titular male body part.
By 2020, he was putting on shows under his name, including Brand Love in 2022, showcasing BDSM gear he designed that came branded with Nike logos—a continuation of themes earlier explored in Dick Worldwide. Elsewhere, he has digitally rendered antiques with branded, modern goods—think a Chinese bronze vessel with a Nike basketball, and a brass bowl emblazoned with the BMW logo.
The effect is jarring and sometimes provocative, forcing us to question how entrenched our relationships with brands and commodities really are. “I want to poke at this obsession that we feel about the stuff that we have. How much of that stuff becomes pillars of our identity?” he questions. Before you start accusing him of criticising from a high horse, he is the first to admit that he is a “terrible consumerist”; as he tells it, he has a “disgustingly large collection” of Nike sneakers. “[I want to] criticise how empty we’ve become as a society, to the point where our identity is built on things we own,” he says.
This search for an identity and “community approval” through things, Enrique claims, has ironically resulted in the opposite. What takes its place, he says, are “ideologies” and “values” that are “expressed through commodities, signifying, perhaps, [one’s] support of a certain cause or [one’s] allegiance to a certain culture”.
And as a professional in commercial creative advertising (he is now a freelance creative director and consultant), he is no stranger to what he calls “altering the DNA of culture” and “facilitating the spread of ideology” by working with influential brands—which gives him the perfect viewpoint to critique the very culture that he works in.
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