In case you weren’t already aware, you are small, pitiful and insignificant. And if you should ever forget that, all you need to do is go find one of Richard Serra’s vast, deep-black, monumental drawings.
Serra, who died only last month, was one of the most important figures in modern American art. He dealt in the void, the primal, the universal, the immense. His rusted steel sculptures made him famous, but this show (the last conceived while he was alive) focuses on his drawings.
There are only six on display; four oblong compositions made of abutting slabs of black and two splattered circles. All are done with thick, noxious paintstick. They’re tar-like, viscous voids, they feel chemical, inorganic, like poisonous elements that should never have been dug out from deep within the earth.
The circle works are the least successful, a bit too obviously cosmic and black hole-y. But the slabs are unbelievably good: huge, suffocating voids that threaten to leach off the canvas and embrace you into their nothingness. There are cracks of bare white canvas showing through - is it light beginning to emerge, or light being slowly swallowed by the darkness? That these drawings share so much of the power of his enormous sculptural work is testament to how good Serra was.
It feels like the latter, like Serra is looking out into the universe and realising it’s there to consume him, that we puny humans can’t fight the vastness of time and cosmic infinitude. To look at these drawings is to see that you’re puny and insignificant, and to know for certain that the void is coming. Which is nice.
