Red Line Service, Chicago, IL
There’s outer space, and then there’s inner space. It might seem impossible to depict both simultaneously, but then, Ravi Arupa’s large pencil drawing "Space is the Place," from 2023, is in many ways hard to fathom. How can an artist trace so many thousands of tiny circles, fill such great expanses with uninflected graphite? How do shapes appear to be one thing and then seem like another? Arupa’s picture, which recalls Yayoi Kusama’s obsessive Infinity Nets, Joan Miró’s amorphous dream forms, and Carroll Dunham’s cartoonish gestures, does this and more. He captures the cosmos with its infinite stars and dark matter, and the microbiome with its endlessly multiplying organisms. He does this in what seems like total abstraction—-a giant curvy blob of a shape, not much more—-and yet from it emerges a finger pointing at the end of an arm, the sun and moon, planet Earth, a cat’s eye, and even a wee little ghost. Boo.
—Lori Waxman 10/5/2024 4:26 PM