In

the

studio:

Leonardo

Drew

and

the

art

of

controlled

chaos

A righteous chaos prevails in the Brooklyn studio of the artist Leonardo Drew – a converted garage in Cypress Hills, one of the borough’s decidedly non-trendy precincts where most of the neighbors speak Spanish. In a front room, an assistant is gluing jagged, irregular wood chips – sawed, burnt, dried – onto lumpy surfaces of blackened cotton, in one of the material experiments and manipulations that characterize Drew’s abstract yet gratifyingly hands-on method of making. In the back, Drew is presiding over a joyous overflow of boards and panels, piles of paint chips, mirror shards, buckets of house paint, color charts, an undulating, curtain-like sheet of amalgamated wood shingles, and mysterious bundles cloaked in white sheeting piled up in the hallway.