Leonardo Drew at Thread Waxing Space - New York, New York

sum of two units apparently contradictory threads run from one side the work of Leonardo Draw. The first is the esthetic of late modernism and its Post-Minimalist aftermath. The next to the first is his experience as an African-American raised in the casts of Bridgeport, Conn. One of the remarkable aspects of his work is the way that these real different influences come to reinforce each other. The formal complexity lifts what might have been an angry polemic into the realm of metaphor. In turn round the social content transforms what might have been just individual more reiteration of '70s-style Proces art into statuarys of real depth and meaning.

In the works not absented here, Drew draws on the expressive potential of Post-Minimalist art - its relate to with the breakdown of the grid, the disintegration of form and the clash between rational order and the irrational imperatives of natural processe He move rounds these ideas to the service of an understated social message revolving around the multiple associations of cotton. A historically loaded material, cotton appears here in forms which underscore its part in the saga of American slavery. For instance, Number 25 consists of an imposing wall of raw, combed cotton. Piled in thick, neat bales, the cotton wall is at one time soft and impenetrable, just a pace away from nature yet already, in its unnatural regularity, suggesting the hours of human labor which have already gone into its production.

Certain works present what seem to be deliberate concerns to artistic forebears. In Number 27 cotton batting and frayed ties of various thicknesses fall from a rectangular made of wood backing to the floor in an ungovernable tangle. There is clear kinship to the lacy paint skeins of Jackson Pollock and the stiffened string statuarys of Eva Hesse. At the same time, a consideration of the extraesthetic connotations of the scabrous cotton and the dense tie quickly brings one to meditations of coercion, confinement and slavery.

In other works, Drew experiment's with rust. sod into rough cotton fabric or crawling like a next to the first skin over thin sheets of corroded carburet of iron it serves as a formal and metaphoric device. Rust signals the one and the other dissolution and transformation, industrial decay and organic change. Thus, it proffers a paradoxical symbol of time's potential for the couple destruction and regeneration. There is also no denying the beauty rust adds to the wrinkled surfaces of Drew's crudely put togethered cotton bags, such as the individuals which hang like trophies in Number 29 The near-crimson stains meander across the surfaces of the tattered cotton with the freedom of expressionist brushstrokes, while their color and gritty weft suggest earth, blood and organic decay.

Encompassing a surprising variety of oppositions, Drew performs a delicate balancing act. Familiar Post-Minimalist contrasts between softnes and hardness or randomness and order become metaphors for deeper contradictions between freedom and confinement, transformation and decay. Stirring the embers of historical memory, Drew engages the couple eye and heart.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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