ART CITIES:Los Angeles -Enrico David
Enrico David’s work encompasses painting, sculpture, textiles and installation with the act of drawing being key to his exploration of form. Mining a space between figuration and abstraction, the artist consistently returns to the body as a point of departure, exploring the human figure as a metaphor for transformation. During the past several years David focused on sculpture in a variety of media and returned to more traditional methods of painting.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive
Enrico David’s solo exhibition at Blum & Poe Gallery in Los Angeles presents recent sculpture and hanging fiber works, two facets of David’s expansive practice, germinating from the artist’s interest in the psychic and corporeal properties of transformation and adaptation. David’s interest in British and European modern sculpture has come to the fore in his work, exploring affinities with the work of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti among others, while at the same time retaining an idiosyncratic aesthetic language which remains purposefully varied and full of provocative ambiguity. “Racket II” (2017), is a grouping of four sculptures, contorted figures in Jesmonite and patinated steel that merge and diverge, their brooding faces often outlined with graphite. Adjacent works in varying mediums present testimonies of psychological tension in the form of wood, steel, and foam, as well as large-scale tapestries. Encountered together in one place, the works in this exhibition engender metamorphosis. As the artist says “The body is a pulsating unknown, always a new vehicle of transformation. Sometimes it feels like a fresh ruin in need of maintenance, sometimes an instrument of magic that rubs against a world upon which it tries to establish possibilities. A channel. An abyss. Unravelling grilled meat, a fissure that postpones nothing for later, unable to subordinate one order of things to another. Transformation central”. David’s body of work to date shows a complex and constantly evolving personal culture of aesthetics. He mines a number of visual sources aside from “fine art” in order to test art’s visibility in the world as it is filtered through its many associated languages: from folk craft to modernist design to corporate graphic display. His configurations of images and objects often invite you into a fictional tableau, dramatising the encounter with the artwork as though it were a piece of theatre.
Info: Blum & Poe, 2727 La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, Duration: 12/5-23/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com
