‘Making chaos legible’, conditionally
Leonardo Drew Ubiquity II at the South London Gallery
Two warring cliffs, crashing in conversation, occupy the Main Gallery of the South London Gallery’s main site. Through lack of another viable alternative, viewers must wander through the pass between them, dwarfed by their mean presence, a material dichotomy. In Ubiquity II, his first solo exhibition in a London institution, New York-based artist Leonardo Drew sets out to explore the tension – or affinity – between order and chaos. The room’s fantastically heavy downlighting frames the art which in turn frames the room: installation art in its truest form.
Abstraction represents the deliberate moving-away from the prosaic notion that an artist merely represents what is in front of them; something that seems like a personal affront to Drew. He doesn’t define himself within the prescriptive labels of ‘sculptor’ or ‘painter’; his work is defined by the conditional: ‘I like to believe that a sculpture could become a painting, a painting could become a drawing’. The artist attaches a similarly liberal perspective to his media: ‘it didn’t really matter what materials I work with. Once you find your voice, your voice will find its way into that material. So the material has become very much secondary.’ That being said, Drew, perhaps somewhat unconsciously, inserts his younger self into the work, as his early work around Marvel and DC comics is papier-mâché’d into the chipboard. He also encourages his viewers to find themselves in the work, peppering mirrored glass throughout the space.
Criticism of Ubiquity II misunderstands Drew’s self-appointed mission. Admittedly, the framing of the exhibit could benefit from a bit more dynamism – the two leering piles don’t look as though they are about to topple over and the ephemera fixed to the walls look less like ricochetting wood splinters, more bedroom decorations – this reading suggests that the artist was going for a scene immediately following a cataclysmic weather event, not clashing representational ambiguities.
In an interview with the South London Gallery, Drew describes the seven works rotating at the same time in his studio, which he fondly calls his ‘seven crying babies’; the one that’s crying out the loudest gets the most attention.’ Ubiquity II is not only a sequel to the artist’s Ubiquity, but borrows from all of the artist’s (and others’) works before that. A collage of a wider oeuvre: ‘nothing is sacred in this studio.’
Drew exercises complete control of his material, taking things apart at will, to serve the next iteration of the artwork. He maintains this power using exclusively shop-bought materials, refusing to use found objects, which he believes are in a lot of ways a cheat.
Though perhaps a little obvious, the feuding sensations present in Ubiquity II – the chaos of the universe and abstract thought, and artists’ attempts to bring some kind of order to the ineffable – offer cerebral comment on artistic representation. In welcoming visitors who traipse through the detritus on the gallery floor, into the space, the work is changed. Drew relinquishes control, partially.