The Brooklyn Rail

Encountering the first of David-Jeremiah’s three tondos installed in the Manton Research Center, located on the Clark Center’s lower level, the visitor looks up to I Drive Thee (2022), a matte burnt-orange disc, five feet in diameter. The wood panel is thick with texture. The enamel paint is piled several inches atop various lengths of rope twisted into symmetrical shapes, including two protrusions that resemble the handles of a whip. It is lively and magnetic. Patterns are carved into the paint that evoke the frenetic footwork of a running bull. The painting pulses with adrenalized intensity. It summons the feeling of submitting to a drive that overpowers one’s sense of self. In this sense, I Drive Thee becomes a command that powerfully radiates energy.

The exhibition assembles one painting from each of David-Jeremiah’s three series of seven tondos produced in 2021, 2022, and 2023, along with a series of photographs and sculptures that marks the series’ end. This work draws heavily upon the symbol of the bull and the spectacle of bullfighting. As a riff on the Renaissance devotional painting, these tondos mark David-Jeremiah’s admiration of the Lamborghini. Notably, Ferruccio Lamborghini named each model of car after a famous Spanish bull and the design of each tondo is, in turn, modeled on a specific Lamborghini steering wheel. If the carmaker was fascinated with the power and muscularity of the bull and the bullfight as entertaining ritual, David-Jeremiah’s tondos offer a more circumspect approach to the spectacle. Through his manipulation of textured paint and evocative use of rope, David-Jeremiah illustrates the emotional arc of the bull fight. In I Drive Thee (2022), for example, he has captured the immersive quality of watching a torero and a bull engaged in their high-stakes battle. The burnt orange grips the viewer and reminds them not only of the spectacle, but of its connection to the elemental aspects of life: as the sun rises, so death comes.

It is here that an earlier iteration, I Drive Thee (2021), rendered in thick black enamel paint, enters the narrative. Its designs are sparser, and the paint has been scraped down to the painting’s base in some places, leaving deep indents outlined with rope. The painting’s genealogical relationship to the steering wheel is also clearer which suggests that David-Jeremiah has gotten down to the bones. In other words, death is on display. This is the underside of the adrenalized energy depicted in the orange spectacle; it comes after the frenzy of the fight and lasts far longer than one ceremonial moment. Here, I Drive Thee becomes an admission that the movement toward death pulses beneath all. Since death cannot be avoided, I Drive Thee (2021) offers it up as release and embrace.

However, in El Cobarde (2021), a glossy bright yellow tondo offers a way to pause the inevitability of death by offering an alternative—the figure of the “cowardly” bull. This is the bull who is unmotivated by anger, fighting, or spectacle, as suggested by the painting’s languid meandering designs and absence of red. One could imagine that the smooth lines evoke resistance—a recalcitrant digging in of heels while some of the movement around the edges offers a shying away from attention. Some of the designs even look a bit like fluffy clouds, suggesting perhaps a turn to dreaming and away from aggression. Most pointedly, this disinterest upends the power dynamics of the bullfight, because the fact is that this bull survives. In this way, David-Jeremiah offers this tondo as a subtle critique of the masculinity that attaches its value to spectacle. Ironically, it is in cowardice, which we might also think of as a practice of refusal, that the “I” gains emphasis in I Drive Thee.

Finally, we come to L’Anima (2023), the final tondo David-Jeremiah created for this series. Painted in all white to evoke the spirit of the animal, this tondo is present only in photographs where the designs are blurred, in a video showing its burning, and as ashes secreted away in seven sculpted urns, modeled after steering wheels (all installed in the Manton Research Center). Each offers different versions of an afterlife to be reckoned with, asking us to think about the cycles of rebirth and transformation that accompany the spectacle of the bullfight. On the one hand, David-Jeremiah makes palpable the absence occasioned by death through this act of immolation, but viewers can clearly (and humorously) see what lives on in other states. The urns offer tangible commemoration to the cremated tondo while the photographs, which depict the tondos in fishing gear on a pier, suggest a type of retirement. Perhaps the body is gone, but the spirit is free? This concluding iteration of I Drive Thee invites a query for the entire project: what do drive and ambition mean in the end?

By revisiting the bullfight, David-Jeremiah draws out the ambiguities and contradictions in the feelings that it summons, yet he does not shy away from showing its appeal. These questions of spectacle go beyond the bullfight (or the Lamborghini); they resonate with his interest in thinking about the ways that Black men have been produced as spectacle and so must reckon with fascination, disposability, and death as a result. It is not incidental that Black men were once described using the slur “buck,” a hunted male animal. By materializing these different valences without reproducing the historical violence that can accompany figurative images of Black men, David-Jeremiah asks viewers to feel the emotional drama of what it is to be a spectacle. Ultimately in I Drive Thee, he is the “I” in the exhibition, serving as our navigator through this fraught terrain.