The Faces in Enrico David’s Sculptural Furniture

If you were to lie on the floor beneath Enrico David’s torso chair, Necromancer (all works 2025), you may get a new perspective on things: the seat’s legs are, in fact, arms. The chair’s leg-arms reach out to embrace itself – or the viewer, should they choose to crawl between them. The underside of the seat is supported by deep, hanging ribs and a thick, protruding backbone that leads to a contorted head, dangling down between where a seated human’s legs would be. The head looks inwards, its neck muscles taut, the face and hair hanging by gravity: all of this frozen in stasis. The bronze work is an example of the artist’s furniture forms which characterize the aesthetic inversion and slipping weirdness at the centre of the artist’s first exhibition with White Cube, ‘The Soul Drains the Hand’. 

Elsewhere, an upturned bronze head rests upon the floor. It’s connected – where you might expect the neck to be – to the end of an old wood planer, and together they serve as the only odd leg of a pale-stained oak table: the tool of its making becomes its support (Intruder). On the flat surface of the table sits Sleepwalker, a bronze and steel lamp with an arched neck, at the end of which hangs another downturned head. From its subdued face protrudes a dimly lit honey onyx globe.

The disintegrating body, a familiar motif of David’s corpus, here meshes with markers of domesticity, amplifying the unheimlich sense of collapse between the human and the quotidian object – walls, floors, furnishings. Five wall-hung tapestries, crafted from cashmere, camel hair and sheep’s wool – gifted to David a decade ago by Max Mara – depict wilting bodies formed from coils of rough cord that lean out from the cashmere backing. The figures’ poses and dress are seemingly drawn from Italian operatic costume design. In Proximity of Man, tentacular appendages flop out where hands might be, emerging from beneath sleeves and smocks. In many of the tapestries, squashed faces peek out from cowls, helmets or neck holes. These body parts are all formed in repoussé copper and stitched discreetly into the fabric assemblage.

Octopus hands, cockle feet, broken necks. These form a visual lexicon that grounds the muted body horror of David’s melding of life, limb and the inanimate object: a David Cronenberg-like warping of flesh and cartilage with cloth and metal. As the title of the show suggests, the exhibition’s foundations lie in an inversion of the hand as an artistic conduit. Rather than a fleshy tool that makes the inner self tangible, for David, the making-material of inner forms is sapped by a soul in turmoil. The internal spirit has rendered the hand inexact, jittery and prone to glitching. As such, the works exhibit a formal splitting that, in turn, reflects the split ends of the internal self.

The core of this exhibition is best exemplified by the three bronze heads of Rivoltura, adorned with cane roots for tufts of hair and connected by a thin, spiralling rod that curls across the centre of the floor in the penultimate room. The Italian title denotes, as well as the revolving of the heads, a reversal or upheaval – a sudden inversion, the act of turning something over or the upending of an established order. In this sense, David’s works materialize the conflict of the internal processes of art-making, making visible the disintegrative interior through its symbolic embodiments and by placing it within a once-domestic realm, transformed into a public gallery. By bringing the inside out, David makes the external space appear churned through, and it is here that the viewer is invited to take a seat.

Enrico David’s ‘The Soul Drains the Hand’ is on view at White Cube, Paris, until 19 December 

^{Main image: Enrico David, Necromancer (detail), 2025, bronze, dimensions variable. Courtesy: © the artist and White Cube; photograph: Theo Christelis}