Press Pack - Raul Vincent Enriquez

Artist Statement
I work to create moments in which something real, true,
and often uncomfortable (but at its base, beautiful)
breaks the bonds of expectation, habit, or social
convention. My work is saturated with emotional
vulnerability, but as frank as possible. Somewhere
between hospitality and frugality, between invitation
and challenge, I create a space where my audience can
truly experience – and digest – an artwork.
Using live culinary arts, video projections, sound,
animation, and photography, I offer my guests radical
and overwhelming hospitality. Burritos, a humble
staple of Chicano cuisine, are the offerings I cook and
serve while mixing my projections; I have refined my
recipe into a mouthwatering paragon of custom-made
beans, fresh lime, cilantro, cotija cheese, and tangy
homemade salsa verde. My animated “wiggly” portraits
create unnervingly candid moments of extreme eye
contact between subject and viewer, while the live food
performance shakes up visitors’ expectations of “service.”
Altogether, the viewer simultaneously encounters the
comfort of delicious food and the strange beauty of
these portraits, faces imbued with florid colors and odd
postures, yet oddly peaceful and genuine. The dischord
of these stimuli produces a new and unique chord,
a kind of harmony between the conceptual and the
pedestrian, the uncanny and the delicious.
“Hand-Signed and Numbered Limited Edition
Extra Cheese Coupon (HS&NLEECC)”
New Museum, Counter Culture, New York
“I In The Sky” A Public Art Project
Conde Nast Building, Times Square, New York
Participants are subjects, collaborators, audience. I
try to make the experience of a live event into
a performance of gifting and barter, a play of
provocation, seduction, hospitality, manners, supply
and demand. I create an environment that provokes
participants’ responses— my desire is to create a
unique bond with an audience of mostly strangers, a
bond that will last long after the performance is over.
Impressive hospitality can be seen as a sign of status.
I see the event of hospitality as a unique nexus where
human behavioral codes cross power lines, sparking
explosions of genuine, unscripted experience.
Raul V incent Enriquez: 131 Boerum St. 1A Brooklyn, NY 11206 • www.RaulVincentEnriquez.com • 347 439 0658