Enrico David's total theatre at the Castello di Rivoli

Crossing the threshold of Enrico David's retrospective exhibition 'Tomorrow I'll be back' at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea is tantamount to entering a territory suspended between memory, invention and dilated time. The title, repeated by the artist for almost forty years, does not indicate a geographical return, but rather a poetic and philosophical tension: "I'm not going anywhere and I'm not coming back," he says when we meet him half an hour's drive from the centre of Turin, evoking an ideal nostos, a tomorrow that is both promise and precariousness, a desire for definition and inevitable transit.

The retrospective, curated by Marianna Vecellio, unfolds in six monumental rooms that correspond to the pillars of the artist's creative practice. It is not chronology that determines the route, but an emotional architecture, a workshop of visions in which the grotesque, the carnivalesque, the theatrical and the autobiographical intertwine in an unstable dialogue. The sudden death of his father during a dinner party - the founding trauma of David's adolescence - permeates the entire work, transforming itself into an invisible memory that guides the choice of materials and plastic gestures, recalling Freud's reflection on the relationship between Eros and Thanatos, between creative vitality and confrontation with absence.

The set-up, conceived by the artist himself, transforms the space of the Manica Lunga of the Castello into a total theatre: platforms, tapestries, rotating paintings and suspended installations evoke the sample fairs of the 1970s, frequented by David as a child, and at the same time recreate a reinvented domesticity, as in Ultra Paste, where an emerald green room houses a boy portrayed from behind on an articulated mannequin. Each element becomes a poetic device: everyday life, here, is transfigured into metaphysics, recalling the suspended atmospheres of Giorgio de Chirico's paintings, present in the exhibition with six works from the collection of Villa Cerruti, a stone's throw from the castle.

Manual dexterity, contact with the applied arts and the craft experience of childhood are at the root of a language that runs through plaster, textiles, sculptures and monumental installations.

The emblematic works, fromC Madreperlage (2003) to Abduction Cardigan (2009), fromEverything Else Turned Off (2019) to the new creationThe Centre of My Eyes is 160 (1995-2025), show how drawing becomes the 'armour of sculpture', the conceptual and operational core of a poetics that merges art nouveau, design and gesamtkunstwerk.