David Zwirner, London
The artist’s posthumous show features dramatic drawings on delicate paper, etched with thick oil sticks – a magisterial play on ideas of weight and light
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 can feel; I don’t know whether it is about to bowl me over or suck me in. The disc leans a little to the right of the square sheet of paper that contains it, as if it had been nudged out of alignment by some unseen gravitational force. Measuring its diameter with my arms outstretched, I’m eluded by the scale and exact position of the circle, and it seems to be pulling me off-kilter. Sometimes the waxy black pigment that covers the surface chews at the space beyond the circle’s rim. The eye hesitates as light rakes the surface. You could wallow in it.
There’s a lot going on in Cheever, Richard Serra’s 2009 drawing named after American novelist and short story writer John Cheever. Another square drawing containing a circle is named Kerouac after the author of On the Road. The circle and the square in Kerouac are even darker and more scabrous, mysterious and threatening.
