Art Central is all flash and flow: white booths, selfie sticks, and quiet deals sealed with handshakes or credit card swipers. I wasn’t expecting to be called out by a piece of art. But that’s what happened at SHANKAY’s booth, where Venezuelan Eduardo Enrique’s solo presentation stood like a trapdoor in the floor.
Mounted on the wall was Untitled, 2025—a baseball bat refigured into a Christian cross. It hit with the weight of metaphor and memory. Was it a symbol of hope? Or a weapon? Maybe both. In Enrique’s hands, the bat becomes a paradox—religion as tool, as bludgeon, as burden. It spoke to something deeper: the way Christianity has long been used in Venezuela to discipline as much as to deliver, to lift boys up—and to keep them in line.
Western consumerism hadn’t just infiltrated the sacred—it had reshaped it. With logos in place of scripture and branding in the place of belief, the sculpture felt less like commentary and more like confession. And beneath it all, a very specific kind of inheritance.
Born in Venezuela, Enrique carries the double bind of a colonized nation and a devoutly Christian environment. His use of Major League Baseball iconography doesn’t feel aesthetic—it feels ancestral. Venezuela has long been a farm system for MLB greatness, churning out players who became saints of the diaspora, their success both a salvation narrative and a sellable product. For many families, baseball was a path out—God-given talent meeting American opportunity. But Enrique’s framing is more complicated. The baseball chest guard in New World Order—strapped to a headless Buddha—feels like armor and restraint, reverence and desecration all at once. Aspiration, yes. But also assimilation.
His work critiques consumer culture, sure—but it also critiques itself. That contradiction hung in the air like incense. The booth was clean, conceptual, and deeply aware of its own marketability. His sharpest critiques were polished, priced, and ready to ship. I couldn’t help but think of Banksy’s Festival (Destroy Capitalism)—that deadpan image of festival-goers queuing up to buy “Destroy Capitalism” T-shirts.
Banksy printed and sold editions of the piece himself, turning irony into merchandise. Just like Enrique, who transformed a gallery into a Nike BDSM boutique during Singapore Art Week, and now offers a relic from it—a faux leather hood gagged with a branded golf ball—as a collectible. So what’s being sold? The fetish? The critique? The contradiction?
Probably all three.
And that’s the brilliance and the trap. Enrique doesn’t claim to be outside the system. He operates deep within it. Logos become relics. Installations become rituals. Critiques become commodities. The Birth of Man (2025) reimagines Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus with a natural seashell cradling a branded golf ball instead of a goddess. The divine is replaced by the desirable. It’s funny—until it isn’t. The satire is sharp, but the craftsmanship is sincere. You don’t laugh. You linger.
A quieter 2021 archival work—produced by Chinese artisans—spells out “N-I-K-E” in traditional Chinese motifs. Originally a study for his Vogue Singapore residency, it now reads like a signpost: a pivot toward industrial manufacturing, and a blur of authorship, craft, and commodification that echoes the very supply chains he critiques.
Even his graffiti roots still burn through. In a 2023 spray-paint piece from his Dubai studio, Enrique replaces the Swoosh with the word “GOD.” Since the artist was unable to make it to Hong Kong Art Week personally, assistants hired from nearby countries replicated the canvas for him in Art Central. It’s blunt, maybe too much conceptually, maybe too little technically. But within the arc of his practice—from street provocateur to global fabricator of branded relics—it lands. Faith and marketing aren’t opposing forces in his work. They’re twins. Inherited, worshipped, and weaponized.
Leaving the booth, I kept thinking about what it means to buy resistance. To cradle critique in packaging and call it progress. Enrique doesn’t offer comfort or clarity. He offers a mirror. He knows the price of participation. And he knows we’ll pay it.
