When you look at a doll, you don't notice its particularities. Rather, you see it in a general way as 'human' [...]If you were to see the doll as an exact model of a figure, as a portrait statue, empathy would be impossible - it would be seen as a monstrosity.
- Mike Kelley¹

Enrico David's work shows hosts of figures: grotesque heads made of papier-mâché, bulbous figural sculptures, collapsed dolls of paper or cloth, menacing harlequins on canvas and in gouache. They often are arranged in theatrical installations that draw on psychological fears and childhood memories or simply perform sly naughty puns - like a private joke told in the middle of a party, or a nickname used in a radio show. The different roles of the public and private are a key issue in David's work, which investigates the convention that these two registers remain separate in the genesis and reception of artwork - testing, refuting and spoofing this notion through what he calls the works' 'contradictory meanings'. Within this ground of contention, the use of the figure emerges as one of the more open areas of his practice, floating midway between the particular and the general. Much more extremely than Mike Kelley's notion of the doll as a 'general' human, David pushes his figures beyond non-specificity and almost all the way into design, creating a space of indeterminacy that he fills with an onrush of personal narratives, background conceits and stylistic allusions. Through it and his explicitly personal statements, David's practice considers the relation of art to the self, and in this particular instance, to the self of the maker, the artist Enrico David. David's work exploits codes that connote 'publicness' and which exist precisely to communicate with the maximum of ease (or as he has said, 'the less obstruction the better'): the language of advertising and graphic design; elements of ritual and the archetype; craft and folk-art motifs. The wall painting Bubble Protest (2007) was inspired, he says, by a diagram dealing with water distribution problems in Havana, where he was on a residency; it looks like a stylised instruction manual for engineers. Spring Session Men (2007) adopts some of the codes of corporate presentation models; for the 2006 Tate Triennial he chose to show his works in the gift shop at Tate Britain. Such gestures emphasise the personal much in the same way Kelley's work does. David's work shares other similarities with Kelley's, including canny and motivated explorations of shame, childhood memory and the abject, as both artists adopt as 'personal' gestures ones which are in fact already oriented towards public consumption. Most importantly, David alleges a lack of emotional distance to the work that gives him the veneer of an amateur rather than an arts professional. He has said, for example, that he makes art in order to help himself deal with the world, and similarly, to make a world that others will feel at home in. Elsewhere, in an interview published in Metropolis M, he explained the encounter with art as part of a process of self-discovery:

I believe that art can provide an opportunity for growth and evolution beyond the apparent meaning of the work. And the less obstruction the better. We are all very aware of what things mean externally, but I think we have a very suppressed and inhibited response to what they might mean to us internally... When confronted with an unclear meaning, it's inspiring, challenging and appropriate to ask myself: 'What do I mean?' instead of 'What does it mean?'²

These assertions - however much one should trust them - and their implications of art's direct relationship to the self find a clear echo in David's illustrations of his own intimate histories. The centrepiece of 'Ultra Paste', his 2007 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, for example, was a re-creation of the room his father built for him as a child, with a replica of an adult Enrico in the corner, trousers half down, rubbing himself against a dressmaker's doll (the piece was also titled Ultra Paste). Oedipal desire shared space here with nostalgia and loss - David's father died when he was a child - and the overly stylised dark green room took on the air of a mausoleum, making David's sexual activity a violation of his memory of his father as well as an enactment of a 'universal' Freudian scenario. The installation was based on a Dora Maar photocollage from 1925 that David happened to come across, showing a young boy rubbing himself up against a woman who is presumably his grandmother. Reflections are everywhere: the Rococo walls of the room in the image are panelled by mirrors; mud is strewn across the floor, making small puddles of reflections in which can be seen fragments of the unholy pair. The boy and woman stand on the right-hand side of the image, pushed up against the wall - a placement which is echoed in the ICA installation. This confluence of sources - David's personal memory and the Dora Maar photograph - frames the installation not merely as representative of David's remembrances but also of a certain sharedness intimated by the Freudian experience. Universality, that is, figures as subject, making a space for commonality not through allegory but through example: the perfect fitting of a personal narrative into the mould given by a public one.

In a similar way, David's description of his inspiration for Bulbous Marauders, a series of sculptures and gouaches shown at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne in 2008, reflects this admixture of the intimate and the general - taken here to almost hyperbolic extremes, where the general becomes the ur-general, the Venus of Willendorf, the ancient statue Carl Jung called the archetype of motherhood:

Thinking of the scrotal sack as an emblem of matriarchal suffocation. This occurred during an episode of 'tea bagging' that took place on my face. I noticed that the human scrotal sack, when looked at close-up, appears in a criss-cross, diamondlike pattern that, when hit by light, creates a chromatic effect not dissimilar to the one of a harlequin costume. The bulbousness of the sack is the shapeliness of the matriarchal being, scrotal sack-like, Virgin of Villendorf-like.³

The experience manifested itself in the gallery as a series of gouaches of these harlequin marauders, smiling cheerfully as they hold dark clubs aloft. In another room tall, elegant black sculptures lined the space like sentinels set high on poles, with diamond patterned sacks, as if made of spongy stained glass, hanging between them. A feeling of violence coursed through the show, as well as passivity (note the lack of agency in his description of the episode), which was compounded by the literal sensation of being dwarfed, even disempowered, by the sculptures. A club lay on a plinth like a weapon set down after battle, and the show evoked the general sensation of being a child in a nightmare; a commonly experienced emotion, of course, that finds its origin in the highly particular (hallucinogenic sex).

By this exaggerated positing of the 'private' as part of a communal art engagement, David suggests the difference between the public and personal to be one of kind, not just of difference in exposure, and both appear in his work as differentiated either visually or in surrounding literature (text panels on the wall, text given by the gallery). One of the ways he does this is through the effacement of particularity - a process which mimics that of normalisation, or the surrender of personal expression to the given langue. Such a technique differs, for example, from other uses of the personal - in visually polysemous work such as Cubist collages or in Robert Rauschenberg's Combines, autobiography appears in thinly veiled references or crafty jokes that undermine the unity of the work's signification. In David's work, which is much more visually cohesive, this destabilisation comes close to full-scale assault. The private assumes a higher degree of visibility (as well as aural representation, as told by him in supplementary material), and works signal their contradiction ostentatiously. The split between the private and the public is manifest content of the work, and the figure is the fraught site on which this tension is staged.

Figure and design are set up as two opposing entities in one field - in, for example, the embroidered figures delineated on the series of tapestries titled Wizard's Sleeve (2005), whose background patterns allude to well-known artists such as Anni Albers or Piet Mondrian. The sharp distinction between the sketchy, anxious lines of the foreground and the calmer, famous ones of the background suggests confrontation and difference between the two registers of personal and public, rather than any welding together into one. In his drawn work especially, individuality is shown constantly as being at risk - of being subsumed into stylisation, mooted by replication (rows of dancing men, such as Spring Session Men or the photograph series How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy, 2008) or treacherously changeable, as in the roster of masked actors, dolls and clowns who populate David's work. The series of small gouaches that formed the downstairs part of his ICA show was modelled on the idea of an audition, where the figures were trying out for their role in David's imaginary theatrical masterpiece, 'Shitty Tantrums: The Squelching of the Slippers', A Play by Enrico David. Rather than auditioning, however, the figures appear to be battling with their mode of representation: many were in pairs, sometimes where one figure was actively engaging with a design element of the piece (as in Musical Moment 2 from 2006, which shows a figure whose hair extends towards the moon, doubles back and becomes the strings of his lyre), or of two figures huddling together in some form of solidarity. In My Fat Friend (2007), two men in grey jumpsuits stand next to one another, the smaller of the two pulling the other's suit down to reveal an absence of a neck, through which the maroon background of the gouache shows through. He does this as if in sad revelation, while the other man holds his arm out helplessly - 'so this is what we are, images'. They are so close together they merge into one, their bulk holding against the threat of indeterminacy. Rather than the emotional empathy that for Kelley stems from the work's generality, here this generality becomes both magical and frightening; it is capable of effecting transformation, but also of wiping out individuality, which is to say, identity - as when a figure, assuming responsibility for a nation, becomes a figurehead. In works such as the one seen at the ICA or Bulbous Marauders, David offers up his own experience - coded through sadness or sexual intimacy as highly personal - as a template for or as inseparable from a larger experience, again effacing his 'own' particularity. But whose 'own' are we speaking of?

In many ways the theorisation of art's relationship to the self does not seem fully developed, swerving between debunking myths of the tortured artist and feeling some affection for it - or relegating this lack of emotional distance, as David invites with his 'supplementary' media of functional objects, design and craft work, to the realm of the amateur. It should go without saying that David's work is not as personal as he alleges. The figure of Enrico David is also a rhetorical construction, addressing an area where the personal and the public routinely collide - the artwork - or question of how or how much the artist figures his emotions in his work. In doing so he joyfully returns the 'artist' to a more authentic construction - as one who sleeps, shits, wastes time in his studio and feels guilty about it. The feeling of disempowerment in Bulbous Marauders is as much David's neurosis as an illustration of the process of socialisation whose effects are heightened in contemporary art, where once-personal expressions become exhibited, criticised, bought and traded entities. David's overstatement of both the intimate ('matriarchal suffocation', 'tea-bagging') and the public (Venus of Willendorf) suggests the enormity of this shift. The sculpture Chicken Man Gong (2005) more explicitly addresses the role of the artist vis-à-vis the art institution, for whom the artist is to be tolerated and even adored, but ultimately disenfranchised. The public sculpture, a commission for Tate Britain, is a semantic and visual mongrel of three parts as the deadpan title states: a chicken, a man and a gong. It comprises a large circle painted as a target, which functions as the surface of the gong; a finely rendered head; legs with fish-net stockings; and a tail of arrows jutting out of what must be its ass. (The depiction of the head was based on a photograph by the French artist Pierre Molinier, who took pictures of himself in various transvestite or bondage poses.)

The sculpture was temporarily installed in the public outdoor courtyard at Tate Britain, and whenever David wished he called up the museum and had a member of staff strike it, in a relationship he has compared to that of a foster child and his beleaguered adoptive parents. ⁴ In specifically barring its use value - that of ringing the gong - from the public, Chicken Man Gong acknowledges art's more general elitism and power games, and the kowtowing of the public institutions to artist's infantile desires, deliberate (like here) or not. The legitimation for the request lies in the sculpture's hewing to David's identity and complexes, as he has previously explicitly established them: an unresolved Oedipal complex, homosexual pleasure and shame, etc. Its ugliness, elitism and contradictory meanings are given licence, that is, by some understanding of the sculpture's 'personal' relation to Enrico David.
A nearby vitrine, also displayed outdoors, contained an array of literature relating to queer identity, effecting a portrait of sorts through influences and affinities. David's work comes after identity politics, and he disallows any sort of reading that suggests a polemical stance. Instead he deliberately operates amongst these naïve assertions of the personal and the public, and often elicits emotional responses from his viewers that match, in their swerve away from intellectualism, his own account of their meanings. His work in many ways seems an indulgence that revels in getting his puns, running an eye over the curves of his archetypal statues, gazing sadly down at his crumpled figures. An indulgence runs inward, into one's own experience of something, almost to be jealously guarded or only selectively shared. Such a miserliness of pleasure is the opposite of the outward trajectory effected by David's works, which share their personal beginnings in a language all can speak, or make use of beauty and elegance in order to invite the viewer in. David's practice wants to make an indulgence - or anger, or melancholy - for a wider audience than is delimited by contemporary art, and the problems and ambitions of this premise make his work by turns visually slick, and deeply generous.
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— Melissa Gronlund