Thursday 4 December 2014

200words: richard serra at gagosian

Dead Load (2014)
A sliver of light between is the electric energy of this paired piece: plinthed and plinth, sledge to anvil, victor, victim - equal now they are stacked inert. “Dead” only for having once lived.The glow of molten metal breathed cool long ago, and the craze lines in the surface, the layered raging rust forest, the flecked mackerel streaked slate curling about mauve figures are a life after death.

Ramble (2014)
Irregularly multiply a brutal idea and what was accidental in one reinforces itself as a regime wrought upon a congregation of iron. This is the power of the mechanically produced many, Serra’s mute masses are here assembled as a holocaust of murdered metal, violently brought into being, the weather-tormented staining tears open the wounds of their making.

London Cross (2014)
Very very very there. I am totalised by a guillotine that pretends to go on forever, cropped only in my field of vision by the presumption of gallery walls. These vast metal planes would cross-brace the universe’s entire reality, and that infinite weight of being is brought to a stiletto point. London is invoked as such a node for irreconcilable, uncompromising singularities. 

Backdoor Pipeline (2010)
Such an even oxidation gives this leviathan hull to glow, and the writhed muscular architectonic manoeuvres of enclosure, disclosure and the womby void want to be Freudian. But it is again the weight, combined with the impossible double curvature, which command attention and awe at the pure sublime bombast of engineered extremism.

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