ENRICO DAVID: THE SOUL DRAINS THE HAND
WHITE CUBE is pleased to present The Soul Drains the Hand, Enrico David’s debut solo exhibition in Paris, presenting over 20 new works across sculpture, textile and works on paper.
21 October – 19 December 2025
The exhibition’s title overturns the well-worn formula of artistic creation: rather than the hand behaving as the channel of the soul, it is the soul that burdens and exhausts the artist’s hand. This inversion resonates with the artist’s ongoing meditation on the porous boundary between inner life and outer form, and on the emotional toll exacted when material is tasked with giving shape to the immaterial.
The works on view at White Cube Paris shift restlessly between registers: sculptures adopt the guise of furniture or ritual objects; textiles are animated by repoussé copper figures; drawings capture fleeting impulses in line and gesture. References to art history abound: the works bear visible traces of Giotto and the Renaissance masters to Duchamp and Medardo Rosso, offering a breadth of citation that resists assimilation into one canon. ‘The work is a foreign body’, David observes. ‘The less I recognise its contours, its substance, its intent, the more it speaks to me. I am drawn to the notion of the work as something that presents itself before me, like a traveller stepping off a bus from an unknown place […] At times I catch familiar traces, yet at best the encounter remains disarmingly surprising’.
It is within this uncertainty, where recognition falters and the familiar slips into estrangement, that David’s practice takes root. Several works on view underscore the recursive, accumulative nature of his practice by revisiting earlier forms in new materials and on new scales. The body emerges here as a central refrain – one provisional, mutable and, as the artist remarks, ‘in the process of being made’. More than a motif, the body functions as a problem-space in which David interrogates questions of identity, performativity and persona. Among them, Assumption of we (2014–25), cast in polymer plaster, evolves from David’s 2014 work The Assumption of Weee. The sculpture presents a figural mass in which multiple bodies rise from a shared base, their limbs and torsos pressed into one another while their heads remain individually articulated, as though arrested mid-movement. Read as facets of a single self, the figures suggest an identity dense with plurality, while the title refers to the shared condition that allows for a ‘we’. Its chalk-white surface and graphite-detailed faces gesture to the work’s origin in drawing – the medium from which many of the artist’s sculptures emerge.
The exhibition’s title likewise foregrounds the primacy of drawing in David’s practice, as well as the dilemma of making sculpture, of translation into material form. Here, the artist cites philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s imperative to ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world’, where drawing is not only a point of departure but also a provocation to sculpture, and the measure against which it must reckon. ‘Often the drawing tells me, I could become a sculpture, but then – what kind of sculpture do I become? What am I made of?’ Born into a family of makers whose skills spanned diverse domains of craft, David’s early intimacy with artisanal practice has profoundly influenced his approach, though the traditions of making are applied in unorthodox ways. Each medium proposes its own resolution, determining the terms by which a drawing acquires mass and presence in the world, whether in polymer plaster, bronze or other media. This enquiry extends into the exhibition’s series of woollen tapestries, a medium in which David has previously collaborated with his sister, an antique textile dealer and restorer. The tapestries exist between pictorial plane and sculptural relief, their woven surfaces animated by repoussé copper figures whose gestural contours sustain the linear impulse of drawing even as they press outwards into form. They are ‘like envoys from what has yet to arrive’, the artist suggests, ‘perhaps foreshadowing a future sculptural incarnation, or quietly delighting in the fragmented nature of their own creation.’
David’s commitment to figuration situates the body as an arena in which selfhood is continually rehearsed. The paired bronzes Self Portrait (2025) and You are her (2025), which grew out of earlier paintings, may be read as a self-portrait and its counter-portrait, or as two inflections of an unstable identity. Their formal treatments diverge: one accumulative, composed of small bronze ‘pebbles’; the other smoother, schematised into legible parts, its silhouette gesturing towards an enigmatic female presence. This insistence on figuration also permeates David’s furniture-form sculptures, in which domestic objects are unsettled by the intrusion of the body. In Sleepwalker (2025), a figure elongates into the stem of a lamp, its head encircling an onyx orb of light. In the aptly titled Intruder (2025), an oak dining table is upheld on one side by an appendage that fuses a wood planer – a tool employed in woodworking – with an inverted, bronze face, forced to bear the brunt of the furniture’s weight. In these works, a partial figure disrupts the seeming neutrality of design: what should serve as passive support becomes laden with psychic weight.
David acknowledges an inherent tension and fundamental precarity in the ways an inner drive manages to impress itself upon his work. At times, he observes, the spirit arrests the form with clarity while the material itself remains restless and uncertain; at others, the material submits and yet the resulting form is marred by doubt. It is within this interval that he situates the ‘quiet drama of making’ – the moment of accord when spirit finds its point of entry and material consents to be marked.