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Enriquez’s monsters at
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Creatures

Some pieces of pop culture are too powerful to be contained by the boundaries of their home country. Something in the Macarena, the Numa Numa Dance, and ABBA struck a chord with international audiences, who adopted them as their own. The Japanese are responsible for more than their share of cultural fads, including the Power Rangers, Pokémon, and of course, kaiju (roughly translated as “monsters”) like Godzilla.

Venezuelan artist Carlos Enriquez grew up watching imported Japanese television shows like Ultraman and Astro Boy. Inevitably, the shows led to toy collecting. Brightly colored toys and action figures belie their origins, as an expression of angst over the dawning of the nuclear age. Many kaiju are mutants created by calamitous manmade events. The uncontrollable power of the monsters is a large part of their appeal. As the world is threatened by ecological disaster, kaiju are painfully relevant again.

Enriquez has turned his childhood obsession with Japanese toys into a full-fledged art career. He now produces an array of monsters, carved in wood or cast in fiberglass, that reflect his interests. The figures are wonders to behold — his Darkron robo-warrior stands over 13 feet tall. Enriquez painstakingly carves the hollow figures in wood, and then uses the wooden models to create fiberglass figures.

Many of his finished figures have been given candy-colored paint jobs that would not be out of place on a classic dune buggy or muscle car. As a motorcycle enthusiast who customized his own Harley-Davidson, Enriquez revels in the space-age perfection of painted fiberglass. The human touches on wooden originals are a charming contrast to the

Enriquez chose Belzor, a rare vinyl toy that has attained iconic status among collectors, as the centerpiece of his recent solo show at Praxis Fine Art in Miami. Belzor, a mutant Cyclops with dragon scales and three flower-like appendages sprouting from his head, exemplifies the kaiju obsession with the consequences of meddling with nature. The flipside of this coin is represented by figures of Astro Boy (or Mighty Atom, in Japan). Astro Boy has become synonymous with positive visions of Japanese technological prowess. In Enriquez’ work, utopian and dystopian versions of the future are intertwined.

“As a toy collector and fan since I was little, I saw the kaiju monsters as innocent creatures. At that time I could notice there was a human being inside the costume. I felt like everything was beautiful. I mean life was beautiful. Now, as an adult, I see all of this in a different context ... Human beings can be as evil as the creatures ever could.”

The sculptures pull off an admirable balancing act: inviting surfaces and the lure of childhood imagination are offset by their formidable size and menacing content lurking just beneath the surface. Nightmares are the byproduct of a vivid imagination. Now Enriquez is unleashing his monsters on an unsuspecting United States, starting with the beachhead that he has established in Miami. If the Japanese ancestors of the sculptures are any indication, they will be impossible to stop. ×

 

Garth Johnson of Atlanta runs extremecraft.com, a compendium of craft masquerading as art, art masquerading as craft, and craft extending its middle finger.