”I cannot tell you much, I can't really tell you much at all. I spend my days doing not much at all. I wake up, I make plans and I break with them as soon as possible. Lately, I have been wondering, if I have forgotten where I’m going. Am I going anywhere at all? Everything seems on a collision course, and I can’t hold onto these movements. I simply collect the scraps before they vanish down in a spiral bottomless hall. The places I go to, they remain the same yet it’s beautiful to watch each of them crumble and then stand perfectly by the next summer or fall.” D.

’When the night mocks you’ consists of a series of paintings, collages and sculptures reflecting on different variations of the same subjects. It begins as an attempt to wander in ineffable spaces of collision, as vehicle of making and unmaking. There, the possibility of borders and integrity unapologetically breaks apart. We are left with some fragmented subjects as dazed floaters across time, space, and obscurity, wondering if they have forgotten something, amidst the dissonant interferences of self-expression and self- dissolution.

This show seeks to expose the recycling of ideas, happenings and images throughout history, as vivid processes of constant {re/de}composition. It may be regarded as a comment on the act of making art and the endless cycles of image (de-)construction, developing along contingent natural and societal dynamics.

Processes of recycling naturally involve prior fragmentation, where matter is stretched until a point of blank matter, raw enough to be a new point of departure. You may glimpse these fragments returning to haunting the canvas, as process-ghost: erotic paper bodies, cheeky dog heads, vaguely inhabitable meshes, frisky frogs, beer-in-the-sky, hovering heads, pickle-vagina, etc., all ostensibly de-territorialised, are slipping between spaces, medium or centuries. Dots, sort of fragment-archetypes, are also a recurring form, being alternatively snow, stars, poppies, heads, food, animal spots, city lights, urban scape, etc.

Collisions may be here regarded as encounters. Sometimes accidental, sometimes divisive, often insurgent. On the outskirts of their illegible gestures, they gradually open the way for new formations of matter which can haphazardly sprout from the scraps of what has been. In their disoriented flux, collisions become difference.

Difference becomes hope, hope of branching along and away but not towards. Substantially co-inhabiting on the canvas, these differences —in bodies, species, activities, textures, medium, seasons or centuries— are here mobilized as a force of emergence, but also as an expression of both resilience and vulnerability. Muddled human subjects are regularly overlayed with candid nature or intrusive architecture in some equivocally symbiotic juxtaposition —houses outgrowing from heads or haunted by luminous bodies, out-scaled lizard over silhouette, branching trees witnesses of carnal intimacy and tragedy, etc.

Collaterally, these works challenge our understanding of how the cryptic cycles of collision/fragmentation/encounter/emergence —from scattered bodies to bold yet elusive whole, and back again— nimbly disrupt the enactment of identity and memory.

There is no status quo to be found. Any subject-point on canvas is endangered by being swallowed by this flux. To enter these cycles suppose recognising the dissolution of the horizon, and embracing the contortion of twisting a line back onto itself. It suggests new pathways for making-from, for repurposing material and immaterial bodies across canvas, while resisting the violence of a direction.

One could have in mind the scenery of the Danish country, and its cycle of fall and redemption, where these works have been painted. David underlines himself how the seasons weave their way into his workflow. There are works birthed in summer, works birthed in winter, and those that fall in-between. In these clandestine in- between spaces, his work vividly unfolds from the meddling of the world-in-construct and the world-in-reflect.

While you wander through the works, the small jokes and quirks complicitly nested within the frames are crackling the gravity of the night, and the tension of the cycle. Their presence is outlining a terrain of breaches and quakes from where you may hear a choir of frogs gently cluck: Have you forgotten where you’re going, are you going anywhere at all?
Text by Claire Aoi