Isaiah Davis Treats Masculinity as a Verse

Musicality permeates Isaiah Davis’s exhibition ‘Confessions of Fire’, titled after the 1998 debut album by American rapper Cam’ron. The show features two ‘covers’: a series of paintings on aluminium, 1999 (all works 2025), that recreate the numbers from the cover of Prince’s 1982 album of that name, and a restaging of the Confessions of Fire cover, featuring Davis, in the invitation image for the exhibition. In the press release, Davis describes how the original image – in which Cam’ron poses in leather overalls, a crucible of molten metal behind him – inspired his own self-fashioning and interests in leather, steel and Black masculinity.

Conjuring up shopping trolleys, safes and animal cages, Davis’s steel sculptures speak the language of light industry and urban improvisation. Featuring mechanisms like padlocks, chains and gates, they invoke private property – but the ‘privates’ here also relate to genitalia, seen in the phallic forms that protrude from tissue-box-sized wall works. For Davis, masculinity is a verse; its codes are fragile and fickle, belonging to no one gender in particular but serving as an energy. Ving Rhames is named after the actor who, in his most famous scene as the gangster Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction (1994), lets an indebted enemy off the hook – provided he never speak of Marsellus’s rape by a white man. Echoing the other wall-based works, the sculpture’s combined ball and chain suggests repression of the self, literally and metaphorically.

The prodigious weight of the free-standing sculptures is undermined by their movability. Quick, a steel cage made with I-beams and triangular plates that sits on heavy-duty yellow castors, is inscribed with ‘QUICK-LOOT / FAST-PLUNDER’: fulfilling the directive from God, in the Book of Isaiah, to take a piece of material and write the phrase on it. The work resembles the inverted hull of a ship, a portable safe or a battering ram.

Paul and Michael, which suggests a penis and an anus, recalls Robert Mapplethorpe’s Cock and Gun (1982), a photo in profile of the titular objects. Mapplethorpe’s objectification of anonymous Black models sits within the lineage of desire that Vincent Woodard describes in The Delectable Negro (2014), which Davis cites in his press release. The book tracks the homoeroticization and consumption of the Black male body during slavery in the US; for Woodard, the psychic lack in whiteness is satiated by a desire for the projected excess of Blackness.

Lyricism is contingent on intervals, just as sculpture is reliant on the spaces it is built around. A ‘theory of pause’, as Davis approaches it – initially drawing on the term’s use as homophobic slang – might entail anything from a social absence to a temporal shift, to structural instability. In his book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), the poet-theorist Fred Moten has characterized ‘the break’ and ‘recesses between beats’ as places where Black social life exists, while also viewing the caesura more formally as a crucial moment of gathering around which aesthetic production is organized.

Davis is an artist sensitive to the way language is manipulable as a material. Wrenched from their original context in Prince songs, evocative lyrics are torched into metal in Slave, two triangular cages connected by chains. Prince was an artist who eluded his own stage name for a while, in favour of an unspeakable, gender-fluid love symbol. Davis’s voice consists of welds thicker than fingers, aggressive and angular forms, the permanent marks of intolerable heat and references to dispossession and plunder. What makes it so beautiful? Something delicate that begins in the mouth and ends in metal, like spitting bars.

Isaiah Davis’s ‘Confessions of Fire’ is on view at King’s Leap, New York, until 20 December 

^{Main image: Isaiah Davis, ‘Confessions of Fire’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and King's Leap; photograph: Stephen Faught}