Turin
Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli
In “Domani torno” (on view through March 22, 2026), Enrico David achieves a solution to the problem of Castello di Rivoli’s manica lunga, a tall, narrow, and very long top-floor gallery inhospitable to showing and looking. Rather than submitting to or attempting to resist the longitudinal pull toward the wall-size window opening at the far end, he plays it physically and theatrically with a cavalcade of images, objects, and ideas cannily installed to prompt and pause the visitor’s movement along the prodigious 500-foot length of the space. More than 80 works are set out to resemble a trade exhibition, unfurling David’s multidisciplinary, ever-shifting practice in sculpture, painting, textiles, and performance across floor, walls, and ceiling, punctuated by rectangular island platforms that double as stages.
Indeed, his articulation of this attenuated sheath of a building becomes a sculptural element in itself. Built 400 years ago to accommodate a royal art collection, the name translates as “long sleeve,” and the allusion to a giant garment seems especially apt for David. References to the body and domestic furniture proliferate in his work, generating the context against which the surrealistic psychodramas enacted by his extruded figurative sculptures can rise to the surface.
The trade show model is immediately established by the first platform, where a dozen objects are arranged. Different sizes mix with a range of materials, though they all share an overriding association with the human form and functional items. Separate yet connected, their combination fuels a fraught mini-narrative of displacement and metamorphosis within and across objects. In Necromancer (2025), the familiar structure of a bentwood chair has been miniaturized and reimagined in blackened bronze, with a man’s arms replacing ordinary furniture legs. It feels culturally dislocated, dripping references to medieval sorcery and black magic. Those arms curve round to ribs under the seat from which hangs a head, facing inward between the legs of anyone sitting above it.
Other objects on the same platform pursue similar disintegrations. One of the legs supporting an adjacent oak table terminates in another inverted head, which bears the weight on its bean-like cranium. Shifting color, orientation, and scale characterize Assumption of we (2014–25), a tall sculpture in which multiple jesmonite figures fuse into one another like fanned slices of cut bread. The ensemble appears to progress across stages of horizontal and vertical, but the movement is also stilled into a Futurist-style simultaneity, like a stop-frame photograph of a single person in the act of getting up from a chair. Like much that David intimates, the piece encompasses several technical and conceptual questions at the same time, expressing time and movement as if it were a three-dimensional reinterpretation of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912).
In this and other works, David allows his compositions to evoke the process of research and borrowing that goes into all making, endowing forms with echoes of their predecessors across media. Most of the objects emerge from drawing. The treatment of the faces in Assumption of we, with graphite powder brushed into expressions of pain and pleasure, registers this transfer from one form to another. Here, David examines how to deal with facial expressions in sculpture; other works treat problems of feet and hands. The essence of drawing, its linearity and spatiality, are never fully lost, and David’s willingness to get under the hood of an artform is one of his work’s strongest appeals.
The hanging embroidered pieces—themselves transformations of painting—serve as sculptural elements within the space, while their figural imagery connects thematically with the textile doll forms anchoring two mise-en-scène platform installations placed mid-way through the gallery. These theatrical figures shift the emotional temperature of the presentation from weird to grotesque. The peanut head of the nine-foot-long recumbent doll in Madreperlage (2003) rests against a piece of trendy modern furniture, its stitched gaze directed at a shapely lamp under which loiters a comely young male figure.
The suggested narrative is developed with greater force in Absuction Cardigan (2009), David’s contribution to the 2009 Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Modern. Large-scale, freestanding canvases flanking a black-painted stage depict queer fantasies. Here, the doll takes the form of a dark and immensely extended, limp-limbed male form. In an image of exhaustion and tragedy redolent of Werner Fassbinder’s more orgiastic scenarios, the doll’s head is draped over a lectern. The over-the-top atmosphere culminates in a hunched Humpty-Dumpty-type figure on ski-shaped feet, clutching its groin and staring aggressively at viewers from a face clipped out of a gay fetish catalogue. David has described this grouping as a “monument to contemporary rage” against queer shame and conversion therapy. Channeled through an environment toned in excremental brown and black, it mixes his interest in psychotherapy with an expository process he describes as intended to draw the individual back from extremes to a “sense of neutrality.”
Ultra Paste (2007), the first piece encountered on entering the show, situates tense emotions within the home. This installation re-creates David’s childhood bedroom from memory, a self-consciously modern, streamlined, green interior that appears more angular than comfortable. In the corner is a photographic cut-out of a young man seen from the back, urinating or masturbating over an oversize artist’s manikin, its flexible arms outstretched as if on a cross. Although David refutes any biographical dimensions to his choice of materials or his anarchic hybrids of figuration, the thematic clusters organizing this show recall his personal history and origins. His mother was a dressmaker, and his siblings became workers in textile and leather. His father ran a shopfitting business at the height of Italy’s postwar commercial boom and avidly studied the latest furniture styles and ways of selling.
From an early age, David was exposed to the languages of making and commercial display. They surface repeatedly in this show. Born in the Adriatic city of Ancona, he has been resident in London for more than over 40 years. Like his life, his art navigates transitions, from one technical language to another, just as David has moved from Italian to English. Pitfalls and misunderstandings accompany both journeys, learning from failure and frustration. Hence, perhaps, his reluctance to explain and his willingness to trust in the mystery of the object, in an abstruse idea over solemn depiction. After all, his is a practice based on the mutability of identities as well as materials.
