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In London’s darkness, and my tears fall

Leon Kossoff: King’s Cross Building Site Early Days

At the London Review of Books, writer Iain Sinclair reviews ‘London Lanscapes’, an exhibition of Leon Kossoff’s drawings at Annely Juda Fine Art, London:

I was thrown off-balance by the intense energy of these marks: the dashes, counter-strokes, over-reaching arcs, sweeps and surges; the structural skeletons lodged in each of these panels. And by how, taken together, and processed down the length of the room, they amounted to something more: a history of struggle and release in the form of a monumental graphic novel from a remembered and reconstituted place. Tension and rapture. Excavation and elevation. The numinous Kossoff drawings are an autobiography forged through engagement with the dirty particulars of place. He’s like a man coming back from long exile in order to make a map of locations where he can begin to search for himself, to confirm his existence. There is a steady pressure to interrogate the specifics of a living past, the oases of ordinary activity that act like radio beacons: a postwar building site close to St Paul’s, a public pool seething with swimmers, a spectral staircase in the revamped Midland Hotel at St Pancras, the molten cliff of a school in Willesden like a glowing crown of red clay. The wrestling of mass into free articulation only confirms the sense of localised fragility. These things will disappear. And the witnesses with them. The pain in this contract is one of the sources of joy in the physical act of drawing: Blakean joy among soot and mud, chains and engines.

London Review of Books