sanda iliescu

Give a child a stick and some mud on the ground and she will likely begin to draw. She might trace the outline of a shadow or make a sign she knows—for example, a circle or a letter. She might also invent rules for what she is doing. Rabbit goes hop-hop-hop, she might say as she dashes the stick across the ground. Above all she will play (and work) with the materials available to her. What is her drawing about? Does it communicate ideas, perhaps about her or about childhood or how and why we draw? Or is it simply about itself, a playful and joyful activity? In her book on the work of painter Philip Guston, art theorist Dore Ashton argued the latter, albeit with reservations. “Paintings are not about anything,” she wrote. “They are mysteriously themselves, self-consistent throughout history, warding off successive interpretations, and surviving rhetoric. Yet it is of some interest to speculate about about. And my own speculations keep circling about the significant (that is to say indispensable) conflict between estheticism and the world, or the events of the world.”

What is my artwork about? Like a child’s drawing, it is in some ways simply itself: something that grows from my love of making drawings, paintings, and collages. In other words, my artwork is about what I am doing as I make art—about the joyful activity of making marks on a flat surface. As I draw, even the simplest of marks has the power to move me and speak to me. A black point I make on a white surface might call out to me in a bold and confident voice, “Here I am!” A long line might invite me to follow it with my gaze. “Come with me,” it might say, “We’ll go on a journey!” A colored shape might have the opposite effect. “Stay still for a while,” it might say.  “Be silent and simply see!”

But I do not make art just for my own enjoyment. My work is also my way of engaging and thinking about the world around me. From life I have learned that relationships between things often matter as much as things in themselves—that, for instance, people are best understood as unique individuals when the nature of their relationships with others is explored. I seek to convey an analogous sense of relatedness in my work. Formal relationships—for instance the way a red square lines up with a yellow one in another part of a drawing—can give an artwork a sense of order or balance. But such relationships can also be surprising, playful, or destabilizing. A square shape may suggest both a house and a blanket. A colored triangle may simultaneously reference a volcano and a party hat.

In my work, I wish to evoke the child’s sensibility and sense of wonder. Often, as a child does, I use the simplest of means: just water, paper, and paint—nothing fancy or extraordinary. Sometimes I incorporate materials from everyday life as well. Why not make collages with common office staples or assemble a picture of a tree from plastic trash-bags or make a drawing of a single blade of onion grass? In stitching such castaways together, I try to uncover relationships and reveal the peculiar blend of familiarity and strangeness of such ordinary materials.

But not all relationships are meant to be. My work is also about resistance and difficulty, about the impossibility of reconciling certain conflicts. The awkward brush stroke, the muddy color, the unexpected smudge, or scratchy scribble all have a place in my work. Ambiguity, uncertainty, surprise, and humor are important. Through such means I seek to challenge expectations and explore the porous boundaries between what are often seen as opposing categories—for instance, between fields and figures, or figuration and abstraction, or what Ashton called “estheticism and the world.” Ultimately, in my drawings, paintings, and collages, I strive to construct analogies to life: life with all its awkwardness and beauty, its messiness and precarity—life as it is lived today.