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