Enrique Martínez Reding
- 18 hours ago
- 2 min read
Enrique Martínez Reding is a self-taught painter and draughtsman based in Monterrey, Mexico. He has a law degree and came back to drawing years after setting it aside. He works freehand on cotton paper in ink, charcoal, gouache and acrylic, always on black backgrounds, never from preliminary sketches. His surfaces are dirtied, stained, scraped and built up in layers. He says the chaos in the work is a counterweight to everything else in his life.
Q: You have a law degree and a structured day job. How did art find its way into your life?
A: I’ve been drawing since I was a child, though I set it aside for many years. Five or six years ago I returned to it as a weekend hobby, and the practice—and the pleasure of it—slowly led to what I do now. Without formal training, I’ve developed my technique and style through observation and practice, in both drawing and painting. These days it occupies a large share of my thoughts and ideas.
Q: You never make preliminary sketches. Everything is freehand. How does a piece begin?
A: Usually it begins with an idea, a line, a figure—but that first notion rarely becomes the work.
The piece and intuition lead me. Some of my favorite works ended up far from that original idea.
Q: Your figures are somewhere between the animate and inanimate. Do you know what they are?
A: Some figures are clear, but the ones you mean—I honestly don't know what they are. I like to think that, just as the objects in our world result from particular atomic arrangements, there are other worlds where a different set of arrangements could produce entirely different forms.
Q: You work on black backgrounds. Why black?
A: I love black—and I love contrast. But, honestly, the black backgrounds arose from the need I felt to fill spaces. It was part of learning and finding my own style.
Q: Your daily life is orderly and clean, but the work is all chaos, scraping, staining, erasing. Is that the point?
A: Yes—that's exactly the point. I guess I'm looking for a kind of mental equilibrium.
Q: What are you making right now?
A: Right now, I'm working on a series that combines painting and drawing on cotton paper, using acrylic, gouache, charcoal, and ink. I've introduced lots of color and undefined figures. The work, in a sense, is both figurative and abstract, on surfaces that are dirtied, stained, erased, and scraped; in places the surface is lifted from the paper and built up in layers. I subtract color by scraping the surface with charcoal blending stumps that have nearly petrified under successive deposits of ink, charcoal, and paint.
