Enrico David’s exhibition at Cabinet centers on the figure of the dandified male, who appears here in a number of guises. In the center of the gallery, a large canvas doll lies slumped against a wooden table, dressed in a uniform lavishly embroidered with peacock feathers. With its slightly sinister, smiling red lips and gold sunbeams radiating from its eyes, it brings to mind 1970s folksiness while also recalling the exuberant, hammy costumery of the artist’s earlier stitched-wool-on-canvas pictures. In a similarly theatrical vein, a small plywood box contains a mise-en-scène based on an image cut out of a porn magazine: Five raucously outlandish-looking men, dressed in faux eighteenth-century costume and cheap powdered wigs, jam on a swirling roller coaster of electric keyboards. One seductively exposes a knee, and another cheekily reveals his bottom, marked with a beauty spot.
In a corner of the gallery, a flat wooden silhouette of a Teddyboy rests against the base of a lamp, striped sleeve raised toward his quiffed forehead, head bowed under the round, moonlike lamp above. Nearby, a gouache drawing depicts a line of streamlined, interlocking male figures clutching one another in a penetrative chain. Both lamp and drawing evince a clean Art Deco geometry, perpetuating the ethos of decorative functionality—but inverting Art Deco’s preoccupation with the female form and substituting craftiness for manufactured sleekness. Cruisy and promiscuous, David’s bachelors playfully pervert the taxonomies of style.
