Nigel Ip

I feel like I’ve just entered a bomb site. Or a temporal containment field where time has come to a standstill.

Ubiquity II at South London Gallery features Leonardo Drew’s room-sized installation Number 436 (2025), a site of entropy where order and chaos collide and explode.

Laws of attraction are a universal truth in this realm we partake in, whether it’s gravity keeping the planets in a harmonious balance, beavers and birds constructing dams and nests out of twigs, or human beings feeling compelled to organise our environments and things ‘just the way I like it’.

Yet, on occasion, we feel a desire to chase a high born out of destructive chaos. It’s a release that can never really be matched, enabling us to let go of everything around us and let chance take its toll.

We exist in states of duality at all times, always rebelling against one extreme or the other. This is how it must have felt when Drew painted and contructed every piece of this seemingly random, but ultimately choreographed explosion of materials composed of painted plywood and the occasional comic strip.

For many, the themes probably don’t run that deep. It’s a cool installation that overwhelms you and makes for a fun backdrop for a social media post; I certainly didn’t feel too deeply on site. But it’s been growing on me every time I consider the manual labour and battle against universal instinct involved.

Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II (30 May – 7 September 2025) is at South London Gallery, London, https://www.southlondongallery.org/