Impenetrable as an asteroid or a moon in full eclipse, and as scabbed and pitted as a rusty cannonball, a black circle looms from the darkness. The disc has a mass and heft you possibly can really feel; I don’t know whether or not it’s about to bowl me over or suck me in. The disc leans a bit to the fitting of the sq. sheet of paper that incorporates it, as if it had been nudged out of alignment by some unseen gravitational power. Measuring its diameter with my arms outstretched, I’m eluded by the dimensions and actual place of the circle, and it appears to be pulling me off-kilter. Generally the waxy black pigment that covers the floor chews on the house past the circle’s rim. The attention hesitates as mild rakes the floor. You possibly can wallow in it.
There’s loads occurring in Cheever, Richard Serra’s 2009 drawing named after American novelist and brief story author John Cheever. One other sq. drawing containing a circle is called Kerouac after the writer of On the Highway. The circle and the sq. in Kerouac are even darker and extra scabrous, mysterious and threatening.
Serra’s Six Massive Drawings is the final exhibition conceived by the artist earlier than his demise on 26 March, aged 85. Bringing collectively works from three teams made between 1990 and 2018, it’s concise, misleading and filled with shock. Cheever hangs on the bottom ground and Kerouac upstairs. Each drawings occupy comparable positions on the wall. It is a present of doublings and variations, of issues that look the identical however aren’t. I do a double-take and need to run again down the steps to verify that I’ve not gone loopy. Two additional works on every ground comply with the identical sequence, with two monumental drawings from the Rift sequence occupying the longest partitions, and two works from one more sequence hanging in semi-enclosed rear rooms. No works face one another. There’s a way of countless return.
The 2 earliest drawings right here had their origins in Serra’s go to, 50 years in the past, to Machu Picchu in Peru. He observed that when the Inca builders reduce stones on the positioning and fitted the irregular shapes collectively to assemble their monumental structure, typically the perimeters of the stone blocks solely touched on one aspect, leaving a visual void between them. Serra made numerous observational drawings on the time and, lingering on the positioning, additionally dropped acid there. Within the drawings Navajo (1990) and Periodic Desk (1991), two sheets of paper of unequal peak and width tilt towards each other. The wedges of whiteness within the hole between these silhouetted blocks of black are essential. How can works so apparently stubborn and secure seem so lively as they jostle collectively?
The place the artist stops, we start. Serra resisted metaphor and eschewed symbolism, however we get them once we can. Within the large Rift drawings, which tower above us like partitions, the planes of black oil stick are relieved by tall, skinny triangles of white, which rise from the bottom of the drawing and drop from above, just like the preliminary, assured cuts a dressmaker may make sliding scissors by means of a bolt of cloth. These angled gaps additionally think of Barnett Newman’s vertical zips that interrupted his calibrated, painted surfaces. With each Serra and Newman these intervals have a profound impact on our studying of each actual and illusory house. You might be inspired to maneuver about, shuttle, stand up shut and transfer away.
The planes of black, every by itself sheet of paper in Serra’s Rift drawings, are a play of dramatic abutments and conjunctions and sheerings, the shapes leaning into each other and propping one another up. They cleave collectively and aside, counting on each other and pulling away, leaving slivers of house and light-weight between them. All the pieces is relational. Generally there may be an overlapping; typically a visible contour like a weld. The black can also be striated with brushstrokes and coagulations.
The drawings listed below are all executed on handmade, near-translucent Japanese paper, an nearly perverse-seeming selection as a assist for the layers of heavy oil stick that cowl their delicate surfaces. I consider asphalt, roofing tar, partitions slathered in anti-climb paint. Made with mulberry and different plant fibres, the Japanese paper is delicate but deceptively sturdy, like human pores and skin, and the black paint sticks Serra used are fatty, waxy crayons which might be laborious to deal with with any finesse (Jean-Michel Basquiat used them loads). They scab up with dried paint and ooze as you’re employed with them. But Serra labored with their qualities to make one thing magisterial and sober. The phrase “drawing” barely accounts for the dimensions of those works, nor for his or her play between materiality and lyricism. These works are all about volumes and edges, lightness and weight.
Some years in the past Serra was requested by critic Hal Foster whether or not he thought he had entered a “late interval”, and what the concept of a late fashion meant for him. “Extra emphasis, extra weight, extra density, extra rigidity, extra introspection. Extra emotion,” Serra replied. And extra drawing, he mentioned.
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