Untitled

Richard Serra’s intimate drawing Untitled, 1985, immerses the viewer into a rich blackness. Using paintstick, he almost entirely fills the composition save for a thin band of cream that remains exposed along the edge of the paper. By intensely building up the paintstick, Serra’s opaque black seeps directly into the paper’s fibres. Drawing has always played a significant role for Serra, who sees his works on paper as parallel to his sculpture practice: ‘The drawings on paper are mostly…made after a sculpture has been completed. They are the result of trying to ask and define what surprises me in a sculpture, what I could not understand before a work was built. They enable me to understand different aspects of perception as well as the structural potential of a given sculpture. They are distillations of the experience of a sculptural structure’ (R. Serra, ‘Notes on Drawing,’ Richard Serra Drawings/Zeichnungen 1969-1990, exh. cat., Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, 1991, p. 179). If drawing gives Serra a new way of seeing, the act itself mirrors his famed performances for which he flung molten lead against a museum’s wall: both are forms of a material accrual. Serra is drawn to black for its mark making possibilities; it can ‘cover a surface…without risking metaphorical or other misreadings’ (R. Serra. ‘Notes on Drawing,’ in Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2011, p. 56). Using black allows the artist to create a densely impenetrable plane, and yet Untitled seems to contain a whole universe. Within the absence of colour is the affecting sliver of white, the faintest gesture towards an equilibrium.