Enrico “La Caduta” David

La bocca parla di se stessa all’occhio.
La leggerezza che viene non dall’essere in grado, ma dal non poter fare a meno.
Le rovine
I coralli
I capelli
La caduta sono io / una terza persona femminile singolare / un evento.

Enrico David's new exhibition is comprised of works that express the close connection and the natural dialogue between the languages of painting and sculpture, which is further highlighted in their spatial layout.

A large painting is set apart from the wall but grazes the ceiling, held up by two vertical metal components: it acts as a backdrop for the “unfinished” figures of the sculptural elements of the exhibition. One sculptureis hung from the ceiling on cables, floating in space as if to deny its specific weight. The palette is made up of muddy, mould-like colours, and the form seems intended to suggest the remains – or the preambles – of a body. The head, arching back, extends into vague, tendon-like filaments evoking bundles of nerves, fibres, connective tissue. Another sculpture rises up from the ground in high relief, enclosing a figure caught within a grid from which it struggles to break free. The object has the ambiguity of a drawing, of graffiti etched into a structure intentionally made to resemble a piece of rubble or a ruin, hinting at a surface whose form may be linked to some past use.

In Enrico David’s works, the impermanence of the image is a state of transition between disappearance and reappearance. Corporeality is always present in his work, even when it seems to be denied any well-defined form. Figures collapse, are transformed and multiplied; they are paradigms of fall and rebirth. His practice is guided by a constant reflection on the lack of unity, by a struggle between diverging forces. The transformation into disorder that ensues from a range of physical and mental states is a condition that the artist senses and explores with expressive urgency. David himself describes his works as “on the verge of not being ready to be born”, in a process he defines a “wayward dispersion of the stream of unconsciousness”.

Enrico David works in painting, sculpture, and installation, sometimes employing traditional artisanal techniques. Drawing is of prime importance, as a point of departure for the creation of works and as a work unto itself. The same variety found in his choice of media also applies to the subjects of his works, which come from many different sources and express a wide range of complex emotional states. David’s imaginary draws on crafts, folk art and design of the nineteenth century, as well as advertising, fashion, and art history (from Surrealism to Expressionism, Art Deco to the Japanese tradition of figure painting).

The artist himself explains why: “My work has never followed a uniform method, because I think we are all always struggling to some degree, trying to come to terms with our fragmented, contradictory nature. But I find that the encounter between these different elements, these different forms of expression, somehow renders that discontinuity”.