Executed almost carelessly on an off-centre point on the gallery wall is Scottish artist Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq’s ‘Black Sun’: a solid graphite drawing of a circle, five metres in diameter. It’s a straightforward concept, but the real fun here lies in the tension between optical impression and material fact. The drawing’s surface has been polished, giving it the sheen of a linoleum floor, and its scribbled layers lend it a peculiar shimmering effect. Then, as you walk back and forth, the shifting light picks out bumps and pockmarks on the gallery wall.
Ashfaq’s piece is deceptively simple: it’s no mean feat giving something no more than a few microns thick such a great sense of depth, mass and drama. And its title, too, points us in all sorts of directions. Is this the end of days? The coming of some pagan sky god? Stranger things have happened in Peckham.