Impenetrable as an asteroid or a moon in full eclipse, and as scabbed and pitted as a rusty cannonball, a black circle looms from the darkness. The disc has a mass and heft you can feel; I don’t know whether it is about to bowl me over or suck me in. The disc leans a little to the right of the square sheet of paper that contains it, as if it had been nudged out of alignment by some unseen gravitational force. Measuring its diameter with my arms outstretched, I’m eluded by the scale and exact position of the circle, and it seems to be pulling me off-kilter. Sometimes the waxy black pigment that covers the surface chews at the space beyond the circle’s rim. The eye hesitates as light rakes the surface. You could wallow in it.
There’s a lot going on in Cheever, Richard Serra’s 2009 drawing named after American novelist and short story writer John Cheever. Another square drawing containing a circle is named Kerouac after the author of On the Road. The circle and the square in Kerouac are even darker and more scabrous, mysterious and threatening.
Serra’s Six Large Drawings is the last exhibition conceived by the artist before his death on 26 March, aged 85. Bringing together works from three groups made between 1990 and 2018, it is concise, deceptive and full of surprise. Cheever hangs on the ground floor and Kerouac upstairs. Both drawings occupy similar positions on the wall. This is a show of doublings and differences, of things that look the same but aren’t. I do a double-take and want to run back down the stairs to check that I’ve not gone crazy. Two further works on each floor follow the same sequence, with two enormous drawings from the Rift series occupying the longest walls, and two works from yet another series hanging in semi-enclosed rear rooms. No works face each other. There’s a sense of endless return.
The two earliest drawings here had their origins in Serra’s visit, 50 years ago, to Machu Picchu in Peru. He noticed that when the Inca builders cut stones on the site and fitted the irregular shapes together to construct their monumental architecture, sometimes the edges of the stone blocks only touched on one facet, leaving a visible void between them. Serra made lots of observational drawings at the time and, lingering on the site, also dropped acid there. In the drawings Navajo (1990) and Periodic Table (1991), two sheets of paper of unequal height and width tilt against one another. The wedges of whiteness in the gap between these silhouetted blocks of black are crucial. How can works so apparently obdurate and stable appear so active as they jostle together?
Where the artist stops, we begin. Serra resisted metaphor and eschewed symbolism, but we get them when we can. In the big Rift drawings, which tower above us like walls, the planes of black oil stick are relieved by tall, skinny triangles of white, which rise from the base of the drawing and drop from above, like the preliminary, confident cuts a dressmaker might make sliding scissors through a bolt of fabric. These angled gaps also call to mind Barnett Newman’s vertical zips that interrupted his calibrated, painted surfaces. With both Serra and Newman these intervals have a profound effect on our reading of both real and illusory space. You are encouraged to move about, go back and forth, get up close and move away.
The planes of black, each on its own sheet of paper in Serra’s Rift drawings, are a play of dramatic abutments and conjunctions and sheerings, the shapes leaning into one another and propping each other up. They cleave together and apart, relying on one another and pulling away, leaving slivers of space and light between them. Everything is relational. Sometimes there is an overlapping; sometimes a visual contour like a weld. The black is also striated with brushstrokes and coagulations.
The drawings here are all executed on handmade, near-translucent Japanese paper, an almost perverse-seeming choice as a support for the layers of heavy oil stick that cover their delicate surfaces. I think of asphalt, roofing tar, walls slathered in anti-climb paint. Made with mulberry and other plant fibres, the Japanese paper is delicate yet deceptively durable, like human skin, and the black paint sticks Serra used are fatty, waxy crayons that are hard to handle with any finesse (Jean-Michel Basquiat used them a lot). They scab up with dried paint and ooze as you work with them. Yet Serra worked with their qualities to make something magisterial and sober. The word “drawing” barely accounts for the scale of these works, nor for their play between materiality and lyricism. These works are all about volumes and edges, lightness and weight.
Some years ago Serra was asked by critic Hal Foster whether he thought he had entered a “late period”, and what the idea of a late style meant for him. “More emphasis, more weight, more density, more tension, more introspection. More emotion,” Serra replied. And more drawing, he said.
• Richard Serra: Six Large Drawings is at David Zwirner, London, until 18 May
