The Gagosian gallery on Britannia Street is exhibiting some of Richard Serra’s recent works. (The gallery is showing the work of the American artist since 1983). The most impressive piece displayed in the show is a colossal sculpture titled NJ-2. The installation, made of two sheets of weatherproof steel, forms a sinuous and abstract construction large enough for the viewer to wander through.
Richard Serra NJ-2 (2016) at the Gagosian, detail of the entry.
What strikes me first is the scale of the installation which, not only dwarfs the gallery space, but also invites the visitor to witness the installation from up close. There’s an interesting incongruousness in the display of NJ-2 that contains indoors a piece which seemed to have been designed for outdoors. The structure’s triangular entry, leads to a dark corridor, turns at a corner and directs the viewer to a room that resembles the bowels of a ship. The two sheets of steel, with their thinness and 4 meters height, not only seem to defy any form of equilibrium, but also create a space that is difficult to comprehend completely either from the inside or the outside. As such, whilst meandering inside the steel labyrinth, I am startled by how vast NJ-2 seems. Then, there is the mesmerising rusty colour of the sheets of steel, which is simultaneously absorbed and diffused to offer a luminous velvet texture. The intensity of the colour evens varies as one is walking through the piece. Here, the very materiality of the walls of NJ-2 brings a pictorial quality to the sculpture and turns Serra’s installation into a construction which seems to contain its own set of large-scale abstract paintings. By surrounding the viewer, the rusty colour participates in the immersive dimension of NJ-2 and it appears that Serra’s piece inscribes itself in the historical tradition of ‘immersive’ paintings; one of the most prominent examples being the Water Lilies by Monet (offered by the artist to France at the end of the WWI) where a camaieu of blue provides the viewer with an ‘illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore’. Surprisingly, almost as a contrast to NJ-2, the show also exhibits another piece of work entitled Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2016) which consists of three imposing weatherproof steel cylinders.
The capacity of the fiery colour of the steel to captivate my attention brings to my mind what Gaston Bachelard describes in his Psychanalyse du Feu (1938). In his book, the French philosopher emphasises how difficult it is, when one is considering fire through a philosophical lens, not to be seduced by the object studied. There is, according to Bachelard, a primitive imagination of fire that is challenging to overcome if one wants to examine it objectively. Bachelard advocates to embrace this original fascination with fire and to explore it first and foremost in poetic terms. To me, NJ-2 seems to be born out of a similar incentive: the fiery curved walls of the installation, like immobile flames, are hypnotic. Here, Serra appears to let the rusty material speaks for itself in order to offer, on the one hand a musing encounter, and on the other hand a resolute study of space and of the perception of space.
Richards Serra NJ-2 (2016) at the Gagosian, a detail.
Richard Serra Rounds: Equal Weight, Unequal Measure (2016), detail.