![]() ![]() The Ramble series (2015), Composites (2016), Rotterdam Horizontals and Rotterdam Verticals (2016–17) were made by transfers onto paper, producing a variegated surface – there’s scope for the viewer’s eye to play. Since then, his drawings have retained their brooding force, though of late they’ve occasionally leavened their pitch. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian © Richard Serra His arms are folded, jeans spattered, head shaven, jaw set. In a photograph from 1974, Serra stands beside Abstract Slavery, staring the camera down. Like monoliths, Serra’s installation drawings won’t bend to anyone’s wishes, won’t be pressed into the service of symbolism or representation like their cousins, the torqued steel sculptures, they exude power and weight. Corners and walls shifted in the viewer’s peripheral vision. As art historian Neil Cox wrote in a recent essay, Abstract Slavery and its successors worked by ‘suppressing ambient light’, by ‘shifting perceptions’ of the room in which they were put. Abstract Slavery (1974) was Serra’s first ‘installation drawing’: a huge trapezoid, made with blocks of black paintstick – so industrious and unseductive – on 168 square feet of Belgian linen. In his drawings, he has the means of escape: black, which the philosopher Alain Badiou called the ‘non-colour’, beyond the ‘rainbow’ of everything else. Colour, for Serra, is never part of the design, because it’s ‘usually not structural’, and structure is what he wants. Their hues are pointedly accidental: exposed to the air, they’re soon wrapped in rust, which might (or might not) deepen from sunset orange to a muted reddish-brown. Think of his best-known pieces, the vast curvilinear sculptures forged from weathering steel. ‘I think colour’s very seductive,’ said Richard Serra in 2012, ‘and not always for the right reasons.’ He’s been avoiding that trap, ‘the illusion of colour’, all his career. ![]()
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