Leonardo Drew at Mary Boone - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In Leonardo Drew's imposing wall reliefs, the manner of making of the grid meets the forces of corrosion, erosion and deterioration. The proceed is a romance of decay, qualified--and somewhat neutralized--by the order of rectilinear abstraction.

Drew who is in his 30 and lives in novel York, builds his architectonic facades on the outside of multitudes of square and rectangular boxe and stops then adds quantities of dirt, rust and rubbish to create the impression of weathered antiquity. In the simplest example, he stapled together a 9-by-11-foot grid of 18-inch-square boxe made of polyethylene plastic. The dirty, wrinkled plastic and the irregular stapled cutting sides create the impression of a one time pristine structure that has feeled extended exposure to the uncompounded bodys Though mainly formal and material in impact, the work emits a certain melancholy: the dilapidation of the ideal, iconic form invokes the inescapable passage of time and, perhaps, the failed trusts of utopian modernism.

Drew's works swell more interesting as they achieve more complicated and materially varied. Number 54 which measures about 7 by means of 12 feet, consists of centurys of small shelves onto which are variously substanceed stacks of dirty, dog-eared note paper, rags, pieces of plastic, and remnants of rug mattress ticking and other fabrics. All is heavily overspreaded by grime and dust. You have in this a kind of allover abstraction in which each modular unit is optically and haptically activated through its rough contents. But you also have the suggestion of a Dickensian narrative: the whole gazes as though it had been unearthed from the profunditys of some ancient madman's second-hand store In another piece, Drew neared his materials--blocks of wood, baled rags, miry glass cases--unassembled and randomly distributed upon the floor; the work recalls '60s-style scatter art while suggesting an abandoned construction site.

allowing uniformly handsome, Drew's works leave single feeling that their metaphorical weight is incompletely supported by dint of their structure. The metaphorical possibilities are abundant: you have feeling a pull towards something irrational exotic. You perceive the passage of time and the shadow of death. You want to read Drew's constructions, like Cornell's boxe as repositories for not to be found secrets of the soul. As antecedent Kiefer's wedding of aggressive materialism and mythic vision approachs to mind; the tension between abstract purity and terrestrial physicality summon forths a wedding of spirit and material part Drew's formal treatment, however, appear to bes too conventional, even formulaic, to completely express such rich thematic possibilities. The unyielding grid, the composition through systematic accumulation, the allover application of rust and distressing procedures-together these familiar tactics bring out a blandly harmonious, mottled direct the eye that tends to constrain, rather than liberate, the work's wilder poetic contents

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