At the heart of Enthoven’s work seems to lie a cognitive dissonance: he approaches his subjects with empathy but simultaneously with a clinical distance. He has described himself as an intuitive observer who has always preferred the delayed interactions of image-making over the rapid and often blunt contact of speaking. Drawing allowed him to share views with ambiguity and provided a means to communicate emotions and complex ideas to his direct surroundings. He would hide allegories in his drawings, often already designs for paintings and objects, in an attempt to subtly influence his family.

Though more modest in aims and broader in scope, his current practice still essentially deals with the family through themes like population ethics, (group) psychology, and domestic architecture and design. He repeats motifs like dogs, houses, and animal traps obsessively throughout a wide variety of mediums and in different scales. Repetition, in general, is always present throughout his practice. At first glance, many of his images look like they are full of digital repetitions that, only upon closer inspection, turn out to be meticulously hand-drawn. For Enthoven, the act of manual repetition, at once pleasurable and profoundly alienating, is related to how images can be at once the same and different. This simultaneity extends to how humans as individuals relate to the collective and vice versa.

His recent work calls to mind weathered 18th or 19th-century manuals and folk prints. Enthoven has always manifested an interest in historical and contemporary visual languages that have functional purposes instead of decorative or artistic aims. Moreover, many of his works take the form of (esoteric) architectural proposals or designs for furniture. However, only after studying design in Eindhoven and sculpture at Yale did Enthoven come to see that his proposals were never to be materially executed. Since he recently extended his practice to painting, a medium of permanency and autonomy, he acquired a new and potent means to emphasize how his proposals are stuck in an infinite state of becoming.

Enthoven describes his paintings functioning much like Sol LeWitt’s instructions, in that they are visual instructions and diagrams for the construction of objects and situations. Their execution, however, takes place involuntarily, like a spell, in the viewer’s mind, there and then, in the moment of encountering the painting in the exhibition space.