MINH LE is a writer and journalist with a focus on contemporary art and culture. Born in Hanoi, he now lives and works in London.

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ENRIQUE GARCIA (JUSTSMILE MAGAZINE ISSUE 6)

Enrique Garcia makes the kind of art that can push you to the edge of nihilism, especially if you’ve spent too long fretting over your screen time. Garcia studied sculpture at the Pratt Institute, but turned his attention to collage-making after graduation due to a lack of studio space. He soon fell in love with the medium. Last July, the Mexico City-based gallery N.A.S.A.L. staged his first solo show of such work, followed by a presentation with fellow multimedia artist Miguel Cinta Robles at the art fair Feria Material this February. Garcia prints, mounts, and shrouds found images beneath sheets of corrugated plastic, which he bolts to wood frames with stainless steel brackets. His materials evoke industrial production—smooth, shiny, and creepily cold to the touch. Like a phone screen. How handy, then, that the Strangelovian threat of the machine now comes from something that fits in your pocket.     

One of Garcia’s works, titled The End of Measure (2024), combines images of car-less highways, cloud-piercing skyscrapers, a seething carpet of ants, metal structures coiled like snakes, and the inner workings of a pocket watch. In this vignette, time devours innovation. Buildings only get taller, and roads grow ever longer and more winding. The most momentous inventions have gobbled up their inventors. Or is it some delirious utopia of gilded animals and androids? Whatever the thesis, the images amount to a montage that is as discursive and disjunctive as pop-ups on a computer screen. But the accumulated effect leaves you more curious than baffled.     

Garcia seems to want to mock a particular genre of images. They deliberately avoid specifics of time and place. They feel melodramatic but vague to the point of near obscurity. Online, they have become ubiquitous in non-linear and non-narrative settings that are too often defined by newly dirty words like “vibe.” Garcia, born in 1995, grew up during the height of anything-goes image boards, where comparable images were severed from their original context. You could say they escaped the burden of truth to acquire new meanings. That liberty traces back to the invention of collage at the dawn of the 20th century. Artists had been searching for a new visual language, but also a new way to examine the old and familiar. The best of them—Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and, later, Robert Rauschenberg—gave us the tools to pry open their minds and peek inside. In his work, Garcia offers plenty of potent observations about our hyper-technological age—encrypted as they are. The fun is in pulling them out from their hiding place.
 
Garcia’s source images vary widely in level of abstraction. One of the more lucid examples appears in Erósion Doble (2024). The work depicts close-ups of two tires behind a cluster of smaller images, as if they were about to run over and mangle everything in their path. When I see the tires, the perhaps literal part of my brain immediately connects their very rotation to the trajectory of everyday technology. Think about the kind of perpetual progress that promises to move us forward, but instead moves in circles, achieving nothing and benefiting no one but tech behemoths. If history is similarly circular, however, we know there is comfort in some measure of change. Progress renders everything disposable, tradable, and replaceable. That also applies to our worst nightmares. They must end, too. 

MINH LE:Can you walk me through your process?
ENRIQUE GARCIA:It’s a very organic process that revolves around found imagery. I let the images lead the way, and much of my process involves searching, accumulating, and collecting them. Then, in the studio, I reflect on everything I’ve gathered and start building connections between the images. The work evolves from there. 

In New York, I spend a lot of time browsing the discount bins at the Strand. I like to compare the process to doomscrolling—mindlessly sifting through an overwhelming amount of material until something catches my eye. In Mexico City, there’s a much bigger market for vintage magazines, with bookstores dedicated entirely to them. I have a few go-to spots there as well, like Niña Obscura and Jorge Cuesta.

ML:Do you search with a filter, a framework, or a premeditated idea of the finished work? Or does the logical throughline linking these seemingly disparate tear sheets only emerge in the assembling process?
EG:There’s no framework. I like to be surprised, so I don’t sketch or start out with a set idea. That’s the beauty of working with found materials. I naturally gravitate toward images of snakes, analog machinery, wheels, and other circular forms. But often images outside of those patterns also catch my attention. For me, the browsing process is non-cerebral. I respond to emotion and intuition. The thinking happens later in the studio, where things become more rational. Then I start analyzing and looking for connections between the images.

ML:In your work, do you intend to make content in the sense of a narrative or a line of argument? Or do you seek a different context in which to think about these pre-existing materials?
EG:My work leans more toward narrative. I’m interested in the disruptive spirit of technology—something that can’t really be captured in a single image. So I rely on images that relate to it in indirect ways. These images, and what they represent, aren’t the idea itself, but they act as visual shorthands that point toward the larger concept I’m chasing. 
ML:If the images are pieces of a puzzle, do you care whether viewers attempt to put them together?
EG:Yes! I don’t intend for my work to be hermetic. At the same time, there’s an intentional open-endedness to the work. I think it’s important for any work to lend itself to multiple interpretations. In the end, it’s a game of building relationships between images while also creating moments of disruption to shape meaning.

ML:What are some of the key themes in your work?
EG:I’m interested in technology itself, as well as the anxieties surrounding rapid technological innovation. Recent technological advancements—especially after the digital turn—are so immaterial, which makes them difficult to visually represent. Everywhere, technology is receding. Wires are disappearing from consumer electronics. Devices are becoming thinner year after year. Even engines nowadays are nearly silent. That’s why my work often turns to analog machines as a way to understand the incoming technological disruptions. 

Another major thread in my work is how technology and industry stand in opposition to the natural world. My work Western Limit is a collage of various found landscapes. It is inspired by historical landscape paintings of the American West. I was thinking about the colonialist perspectives that saw the New World as land to be populated, exploited, and extracted from.

ML:Why do you make it a point to only work with whole images rather than offcuts?
EG:When I came across these images, they already had a life of their own. Someone else took the photos, deemed them worthy of publication, and they appeared in a specific place at a specific time. Using whole images instead of offcuts is a way of acknowledging that history. My work is about retaking and repurposing them. I also find it interesting to build a new whole out of individual pieces that are themselves already complete—each with its own reason for existing and belonging somewhere.

ML:Do you think there’s a connection between the collage-like nature of your work and the more-is-more method of aggregation that’s essentially delivering today’s torrent of information online?
EG:Maybe that is another reason to respect the boundaries of the imagery itself. We’re already so accustomed to experiencing the world through different viewports—TV screens, phone screens, computer screens. There’s a fundamental divide between the physical world and the digital world, where our access to the digital realm comes through fragmented windows. I think there’s an interesting parallel here. We already accept these fractures in our daily lives, so it feels natural for the work to take on a similar form. It’s something I definitely think about.

ML:You’ve talked previously about the importance of establishing visual hierarchies through scale. Is it fair to say the resulting legibility—or illegibility—also changes the meaning of an image?
EG:I see it as my way of expressing authorship. Since I’m working with images that originally belong to others, I look for ways to reshape them. Sometimes, I see an image and recognize a specific potential—just by rotating it or changing the scale, it transforms into something entirely different. Certain details become more apparent, things you might not have noticed otherwise. For example, in my work Erósion Doble, increasing the scale of a found advertisement for tires drastically changes your perception of the image. A tire that you might otherwise associate with a car transforms from quotidian to industrial.  

ML:Speaking of tires—I see that you’ve made a large sculpture recently. How did that come about?
EG:My first show in Mexico City was in a fairly large space. That experience led me back to sculpture. I created these room dividers out of ball chains, which subdivided the gallery and subtly altered how people moved through the exhibition, and they framed certain views in a really beautiful way. At first, I felt kind of unresolved about them. They were more of an exhibition design element. They had no titles and weren’t meant to be standalone pieces, but that was the first time I really started thinking about sculpture in relation to my wall work.

I recently showed this sculpture at Feria Material. It’s a giant wheel, inspired by the mud chains used on tires. You sometimes see them in the city. MTA buses use them on snowy days. But they’re also made for large industrial vehicles used in mining and agriculture. I wanted to create a wireframe or shell of a tire, replacing the heavy industrial chains with ball chains, which is more commonly associated with home decor or jewelry. Since the links in ball chains are spherical, they have an entirely different relationship to traction than those in industrial chains do, which adds another layer to the piece.

ML:It looks like a mammoth roll of duct tape draped in chains.
EG:Yes, it’s actually under immense tension to hold its shape. Since it’s not heat-formed, everything is done cold, relying solely on pressure to maintain the form. The chains are pulled taut under this pressure of the rolled plastic. There are no fasteners. So without the plastic, the chains would collapse, and without the chains, the plastic sheet would simply roll flat. To construct it, I used small stainless steel clips that I shaped with pliers. They started as a C-shape, which I then closed to link the ball chains together by hand. I modeled the piece in 3D first, then assembled it one section at a time, working flat before bringing it into its final form.

ML:For how much your work alludes to industrial machinery, it’s never just hard lines and uncompromising geometry. I’ve seen images of the human body, too.
EG:With the serpentine as one of the main themes I’m interested in, there is no shortage of curves in my work. First, there are algebraic curves. Often these are mapped onto the landscape to create roads and infrastructure. When designing highways, for example, engineers use mathematical functions to ensure smooth, efficient curves. Second are aerodynamic curves—the ones that shape fast-moving objects like cars, planes, and other vehicles designed for frictionless movement. The third type is what I call erotic curves—those found in consumer goods, like the shapes of sunglasses, car seats, or ergonomic furniture. These curves have a seductive quality, often implying the body in some way.

ML:What’s your personal relationship with technology?
EG:I think I feel overwhelmed by it. The most obvious way to think about it is social media and this idea of constant connectivity—being always online. I’m skeptical of this global push to get everyone online. Are we really better off? And if so, at whose expense? I value slowness and cultivating a connection with nature. These values feel at odds with the present moment. On a psychological level, speed has an almost seductive quality. It’s sexy. It’s alluring. It’s exciting—like driving in a fast car with the top down. There’s a thrill to it. But on a personal level, I’m skeptical. I’d say my work critiques it, though it’s more about questioning it than outright rejecting it.
ML:Before we go, what’s your algorithm feeding you today?
EG:I’m mostly on TikTok, and it’s filled with Zoomers’ cooking recipes. You know, like the type of stuff the New York Times Cooking would never approve of.

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