Latin Girls

Created in 1986, Mar, Henry, Navy, and Humpty form a group of mixed-media drawings in which Enrique Castro-Cid translates the procedures of early computer-aided drawing into tactile form. Each work combines loosely threaded textiles and felt-tipped marker drawings on mounted board. They establish a dialogue between the loom’s grid and the drawn line. Threads emerge from the edges of the woven fields and continue outward across the support, insisting that the line is not a closed contour but an open trajectory that extends beyond the limits of the textile’s surface. The marker drawings echo this logic: contours are stretched, bent, or subtly misaligned, as if responding to invisible mathematical pressures rather than to conventions of anatomical coherence.

Castro-Cid’s experiments in computer-aided design during the late 1970s and 1980s inform these works at both conceptual and formal levels. Beginning from classically proportioned human and animal figures, he subjected their outlines to operations analogous to differential geometry, conformal mapping, and multilinear perspective, producing a kind of “scientific cubism” in which bodies appear warped by forces that exceed the flat plane of the image. The figures are shown as if in the midst of transformation.

Formally, the works dramatize the relationship between grid and deviation. The textile weave establishes a rational, modular structure akin to the coordinate systems underlying early CAD interfaces. Against this measured ground, the extending threads and warped marker lines register the moment when the system begins to misbehave. The result is a hybrid image-object. Seen retrospectively, these pieces anticipate the more elaborate multifigure distortions developed in later works, such as Cow’s Singularity (1988), yet they stand independently as rigorous studies in how computational thinking could be translated into the language of the drawn line.