On the table between Enrico David and me, the sun bounces off a bowl of iridescent strawberries and Josef Koudelka’s Exiles. The book is open at an image taken at a psychiatric hospital in Palermo, Sicily, in 1985. In the lugubrious black and white image, several solitary figures try to avoid the heat in various ways, forming a strange and melancholy composition. Two men in the foreground lie despondent on the ground. “I seem to keep returning to it,” David muses, in his east-London-inflected Italian cadence.
We are sitting in one of the artist’s two London studios; this one, in Bethnal Green, is joined to his home. The sound of water trickling in the background comes from a new sculpture — specifically it comes out of the mouth of a small figure, prostrate on a pleated structure in wood and resin patinated with bronze and copper, titled “Le Bave (Solar Anus)” (2023). Behind David is another new, flat-looking sculpture, the complementary “Dame a L’Éponge” (2023). She protrudes into space with copper-plated steel limbs, clumsy and uncertain, a prong bearing forth the titular sponge.
