Maker's mark

Apr. 28—details

—Enrique Figueredo: Sigue Pasando Por Aquí

—Runs through July 17

—Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, 436 S. Guadalupe St.

—505-982-8111, zanebennettgallery.com or enriquefigueredo.com

Enrique Figueredo was on the trail, far from his studio, when he made one of the great discoveries of his life. Several years ago, the printmaker was hiking at El Morro National Monument, about 180 miles southwest of Santa Fe, when a park ranger hailed his attention.

Figueredo had been visiting New Mexico churches and missions for years, drawing many of them, but El Morro was new to him.

As he emerged from a hike, a park ranger noticed that he had missed a right turn that would've taken him past a historic inscription.

"I was like, 'What inscription?'" says Figueredo. "They're like, 'Oh, there's these 500-year-old inscriptions from the conquistadors that came through here.' I lost my mind. The really funny part of the story is I went back with a piece of paper and graphite, and I was going to make a rubbing of the inscriptions. I thought it would be totally fine and the park ranger was like, 'Are you kidding me? It's 500 years old. What are you doing?' I'm like trying to climb over the fence and make a rubbing, and they're like, 'Get out of here.'"

Figueredo, whose Sigue Pasando Por Aquí exhibit is currently showing at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, isn't easily deterred. The Venezuelan-born artist had found something that fired his curiosity, and he wasn't able to let it go.

He later went back to El Morro with a hi-res digital camera, took a photo of the inscriptions, and then reproduced them as laser-cut wood blocks.

He downloaded maps, he went to the library, and he traced the exact routes the conquistadors had taken. He recognized a pattern, and it influenced his art.

Figueredo made several woodcut images of famous New Mexico missions for his Paso Por Aquí series on display at Zane Bennett, and above them, he rendered the inscriptions from El Morro because he believes that together, they tell a story that hasn't been told.

"They were going up the Rio Grande. They would settle, and they did the San Miguel church," he says of the conquistadors. "They did Santa Cruz and went up to Taos. They were erecting these missions, and I thought, 'The missions are marks on the landscape, just like the inscriptions are a mark on the rock, just like the bark beetles make a mark on the tree, and just like I'm making a mark on the wood.' I'm using the language of printmaking and mark-making in landscape to try to talk about something I didn't learn about in my history books."

Figueredo, now an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin, found a theme that would add the element of animation to his work.

When you enter his exhibit at Zane Bennett, you'll see the gigantic aluminum zoetrope that contains multiple images of topography from Caracas, Venezuela.

Figueredo moved from Venezuela to the U.S. when he was very young and wasn't able to return until he was 17 or 18. He said he has family there and made many trips back to Venezuela between 1998 and 2014, until it became politically difficult to return.

The artist lived in New Mexico on and off since 2005 before moving to Austin in late 2021 — and in some ways, he says, exploring New Mexico helps him make connections to his homeland.

"What happened in New Mexico with conquest also happened all throughout Latin America and South America. It was just different conquistadors," he says. "I'm using the New Mexico story as a map for what happened everywhere in Latin America, including Venezuela. Venezuela has one of the earliest settlements of the Spanish Conquest in Cumaná. There are missions there all throughout the landscape all the way into the Amazon, but I can't access those spaces. I can access the spaces in New Mexico that tell a similar story."

The woodcuts of the Caracas topography are large and imposing and are placed inside a hulking 15-foot diameter zoetrope that takes two people to spin. Figueredo says the zoetrope is deceptively light; he made it here at Stark Raven Fabrication, and it can be taken apart in quarters. But when it spins, you get a stunning panorama of mountains, clouds, and sky. Figueredo says he was influenced by the way that people scroll through images on social media, and he wanted to give them a moving view of the Cerro El Ávila mountain range that serves as a postcard of Caracas.

The artist says his Caracas topography is influenced by family photographs and his own drawings. But that's just the beginning for these nearly four-foot-square wood blocks.

"I paint the block completely black, and I start drawing on it with a white Conté crayon," he says. "I step back and [assess] how realistic I want it to look. Does the perspective need to be exact or can it be a little expressionistic? I make those decisions and then I go back with the same Conté crayon and make a more detailed drawing on top. And then I start carving. I don't like to trace, and I don't like to use projectors because I want it to have that kind of handmade surrealistic look to it. I just start carving, and it puts me in kind of a trance."

He's working with traditional wood-carving tools, a U gouge and a V gouge, and he estimates that each of the 12 blocks takes about 60 hours to complete.

At some points of the process, he's lying on top of his own drawing as he blurs or erases the line of the crayon. But that blurring of the lines actually suits the work, he says. Figueredo does most of the work right-handed but has to switch to his left because his arm gives out.

"I strategically know when to switch," he says. "I'm like, 'OK, I want this to look a little funky and have a lot of emotion and a lot of character.' So I'll switch on purpose to my left hand not only to give my right hand a break but to make something look a little more frantic or chaotic because I have no control with the left. Before I go into it, sometimes I'll make marks; I'll write a '1' or a '2' on the block, the 1 being my right hand and the 2 being my left."

Pull Quote

Figueredo methodically chips away and uses sandpaper, steel wool, and Brillo pads to create the illusion of texture and color. The lines begin to form images on their own, and sometimes those images are more interesting than his drawing — so he goes with them.

In his piece Cretaceous Seaway, created in 2021, Figueredo made a monumental woodcut inspired by a camping trip to the badlands of northwestern New Mexico. The skyline and subtle grading of colors suggests blacks, grays, and greens; in the foreground, the rocks sip fluids out of a whale that may have lived there millions of years ago.

Figueredo, characteristically, jams a lot of ideas into his woodcuts.

"If you think about Venezuela, the main thing most people think of is oil, and so I was thinking about what preceded oil," he says. "That was the sperm whale and spermaceti and the whaling industry and humans almost made sperm whales extinct. ... The whaling industry ended, and now we're in the oil industry, and I'm thinking, 'When are we going to run out of oil and what comes next?' I'm sitting in this ancient seabed, which seems like a moment when the world changed and thinking about how nature is going to take back its resources."

Figueredo says he didn't know anything about printmaking until he took an introductory class as an undergrad, and he fell in love with woodworking over time. As a professor, he hopes to inspire the same love of craft in his students. He says he still has a long way to go to perfect his craft, but that's part of what inspires him.

"It's the labor," he says. "I think it's the resistance of the wood and the fact that I'm using carving tools. You have to have a really good drawing. But then on top of that you have to carve it. I think I'll be learning how to carve wood forever, and I think that's really important to me. When you look at a Japanese woodblock print, and you read about these master printers, they were doing it their whole lives. Then they had an apprentice that carried it on."