Installation view of Ultra Paste (2007), Enrico David, Domani torno (2025), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. Photo by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.
In Enrico David’s installation Ultra Paste (2007), a surreal reimagining of the childhood bedroom that his interior designer father created for him, a mood of emotional and symbolic tension envelops the scene. First shown at London’s ICA in 2007, then in Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery the following year, the work is now being shown as part of a solo exhibition of David’s works in Turin’s Castello di Rivoli, entitled Domani torno (“I’m back tomorrow”).
The walls, panels of vibrant green, include a precisely designed alcove into which a wooden single bed neatly slots, equal parts workman’s desk and hospital bed. There is a mysterious oil slick leaking from a nook in the walls, and a giant, slightly distorted wooden mannequin stands in a crucifixion pose. The key figure, however, is a photographic cut-out of the artist himself, trousers slightly down to reveal buttocks, and hands out of sight. Is he urinating into the corner? Self-pleasuring? We cannot be sure. In the context of the youthful bedroom designed by a parent, the work is unnerving in its visceral suggestion of a private, possibly sexual moment. The contradiction between the beautifully designed room, the leaky floor, and a possible act of sedition – an act of unconscious defiance against paternal authority, perhaps a marking of territory – affords the tableau a powerful and provocative charge.
The work’s title seems to refer to bodily or bonding materials: ceramic repair paste, angling bait, hair styling products, all distinguished by superior strength, texture, and performance in electronics cooling, home repair and cosmetics. Perhaps, too, of the family ties that tether us together: David’s work is haunted by the loss of his father, who died suddenly of a heart attack when the artist was 17. The traumatic, spectacular way he died – at a dinner party in front of 40 guests – was a pivotal moment in the artist’s life, an early confrontation with death and the absurdity of absence. At the funeral, David was given Valium, passed out, and only woke up when it was over, missing his chance to bid his father farewell. The memory of his father’s death pervades the works in Domani torno like a fiction, as if David is casting his father in the dramas he stages. In David’s words, “[I am] using memory as an information system or database to interact with, and not just to be a victim of.”
David’s work precisely centres the physical body, not necessarily as a site of liberation or transgression alone, but as something awkward, weird, leaking, compromised. The artist does not attempt to heal the rupture of his father’s death, but rather works within it, a psychological rehearsal in which intimacy, corporeality and surveillance are bound together, like a paste that never fully dries. Christabel Stewart