Leonardo Drew
Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston
- John Devine -
Leonardo Drew, Number 33A, 1999; canvas, metal boxes, oxidized metal, rust, shoes, wire; 99 x 96 x 22 inches; collection of the McNay Art Museum; museum purchase with the Helen and Everett H. Jones Purchase Fund; photo © McNay Art Museum
Existed: Leonardo Drew, 2009; installation view, Blaffer Gallery; photo
© Rick Gardner
My first encounter with Leonardo Drew occurred seven years ago, on a visit to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. If memory serves, Drew’s sculpture Number 33A was installed in an inner room, with subdued lighting. An almost-square grid, approximately eight feet by eight feet, it was made up of narrow stacked metal boxes jammed with detritus, mostly rusted metal scrap, wire and shoes. The most compelling element of the sculpture was a number of flat, rusted metal plates that jutted out from the plane of the grid, quite precariously, threatening to slide out and onto the floor with the slightest vibration. The work dominated the room; indeed, if any other works shared the space, they are lost to my memory. Number 33A was totemic and enigmatic, mysterious in tone, its presence adamant.
Number 33A is included in Existed: Leonardo Drew, the first mid-career survey of Drew’s work (it would seem those metal plates aren’t so precarious after all). Curated by Claudia Schmuckli, the exhibit brings together fourteen major sculptures and twelve works on paper that represent nearly two decades of output by this Brooklyn-based artist with San Antonio connections; and Number 33A isn’t the only compelling presence in the show.
Another would be Number 8, described as a breakthrough piece for the artist and the earliest work on view. A large, uneven curtain, nine feet high by ten feet across, comprised of braided cords, wood slats, paper and feathers, some still attached to dead birds (Drew is the kind of artist who likes to give conservators fits), Number 8 suggests Jim Hodges gone over to the dark side, though it must be noted that Drew’s sculpture precedes Hodge’s flower curtains by several years. Number 8 is, to say the least, a dark and foreboding construction—a barely controlled chaos. Much of Drew’s work takes the grid as an organizing principle; here, in Number 8, the grid is hanging on for dear life against an aesthetic that has more in common with an “outsider” artist like Thornton Dial than Drew’s obvious art-world referents, including Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Eva Hesse, Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, Picasso and Robert Smithson, as well as artists of the Arte Povera movement.
As the title of the exhibition makes clear, Drew’s work is concerned with the passing of time; implicit in the passing of time is the entropy inherent in closed systems. I’m not aware of any artists for whom rust is such an integral medium. Number 14 is a vertically oriented rectangle, eight-and-a-half feet high and just shy of seven feet wide, whose media is described on the catalogue checklist as “oxidized metal, rust.” That’s it, just metal and oxidation, thin bands of metal affixed to a ground that threaten to disintegrate with a breath. The eye is sustained by the shifting tonalities and textures afforded by those relatively unafflicted bands against an oxidized field. Existed is both a kind of self-portrait of the artist and an encyclopedia of his practice. The exhibition offers a summation of the arc of Leonardo Drew’s career up to now, leaving future trajectories tantalizingly open.
Read the full review online at www.artlies.org.
John Devine is a freelance critic based in Houston.