Description
Enrique Guadarrama Solis’ aquatints confront digital patterns and colours. He works with digitised images using a classical technique, leading them to appear delicate and softer. Each print has its specific colour pattern. The tiny squares making up the works seem to form patterns, which the observer might see as images. These motifs will mesmerise the viewer. Solis describes his work as centering “around graphic processes and the juncture between analogue and digital that redefines the role of tradition and craft in our present” (2019). For him, printmaking is a medium “that engages with reality through concepts such as appropriation, reproduction and seriality” (2019). His works present in our 2019 Mini Maxi Print Berlin exhibition contest contemporary technological images. Whereas print-making used to be the only way to produce reproducible images, these can now be massively produced using new instruments. Reproducible images are now much easier to access and created through technology, possibly devaluing the ancient laborious technique of printmaking. Contemporary form of technological images are created through pixels and the CMYK four colour model used for creating and reproducing images on a computer screen (Enrique Guadarrama Solis, 2019). Solis engages both traditional print-making and the present-day new version by intersecting traditional printmaking, pixelated structures and the CMYK colour model in his prints. He transforms pixels into elements using etching and aquatint grids. He imitates the CMYK model manually by overlapping different plates and colours on a single paper. This results in abstract works that “open up spaces of visual contemplation as an alternative to immediateness and uncontrolled reproduction that determine visual culture today” (Enrique Guadarrama Solis, 2019).
