I often think of Michael Fried, the critic who first denounced the
intrusion of theater on art in the 1960s, fuming. Art has only become
more theatrical since then, and, to be fair to Fried, in these
installations, performances, and happenings, what could be a fruitful
tension between objects (space) and events (time) is not always very
well thought-out. Enter Enrico David, a London-based, Italian-born
artist whose first solo show in the United States, currently up at
Seattle Art Museum, is an affecting exploration of just this tension,
of the middle zone between thing and idea.
The lights in the gallery have been turned off. Illuminating the
various paintings, posters, and sculpture instead are handmade paper
lamps hanging from wallpaper silhouettes of lampposts on the wall. The
lamps bear the diamond patterns of a Harlequin’s costume, a pattern
that repeats across the show: on dodgy, winking figures wielding clubs;
on contortionists with big teeth; on twin entertainers with droopy,
malformed eyelids. The environment, like the commedia dell’arte
tradition the mischievous character comes from, is a flexible allegory,
rich with associations but open to many interpretations. Where are we,
exactly? When are we?
The single sculpture resembles a mysterious relic from an
archaeological dig. Some of the paintings are graphic, like posters,
like ephemera from some long-finished event. You wander around in this
dimly lit environment, experiencing something in the present, but it’s
as if the whole thing were both a documentation of something that has
already happened and its reenactment with a twist. The twist comes from
the incompleteness of the documentation, the way all of these images
feel related but don’t quite lead back to any one thing, except the
artist himself.
This Bulbous Marauder (pretty great title) is not the
definitive Bulbous Marauder, either. There are other shows by
this artist with this title, and, further complicating things, each
object in this show is separately labeled and titled Bulbous
Marauder, and this is not the whole set of objects with that title,
just a selection of them. In other words: More is out there. 
