NEW YORK, NY.- Gallery Molly Krom is presenting “In the Garden of (Plastic) Paradise,” a show of recent drawings and collages by Sanda Iliescu. An artist whose work blends the dynamic visual energy of abstraction with often narrative and figural suggestiveness, Iliescu turns her attention in the current show to that most naturalistic and nostalgic of subjects – the bird. The results are unexpectedly moving.
Modeled on birds seen in nature and in books, Iliescu’s bird drawings – done with graphite, colored pencil, Sharpie markers, discarded plastic and sewn embroidery thread – do not altogether shun the evocative and expressive sweetness one associates with traditional renderings of birds. Yet Iliescu’s sometimes fragile, sometimes ungainly birds, are so simply and even at times primitively rendered that one cannot say that what is moving about them is the subject. It is rather Iliescu’s odd juxtaposition of boldly drawn lines with winding, sinuous strings of handwriting and strange floating abstract shapes just barely suggestive of trees and other foliage, that entrances and engages us. As such, these elusive and ethereal, yet decidedly un-nostalgic drawings draw their power as much from the poetry of abstract form as they do from nature.
At the same time, another set of purely abstract drawings in the exhibit partake as much of an aesthetic of nature as they do of abstraction. “Snow Drawing 2,” for instance, with its spartan assemblage of slanting lines and shapes conveys the glowing, crystalline feeling of light bouncing off snow and ice with an economy and intensity that few realistic renderings achieve. “Floriani Unfinished I,” though in essence only a complex web of colored shapes and odd plant-like lines, nevertheless blooms before our eyes with its exuberant pageant of colors and textures.
Iliescu’s art, like the art of many collagists, revels in raw contrasts and sharp juxtapositions, in that rebellious sensibility that Picasso, another collagist, likened to “throwing dust in the eye” of the conventional canvas and, by implication, the viewer. In her energetic variety of technique, material, and approach, one that shuns the unitary, uniform branding so prevalent in art today—Iliescu is perhaps at her most refreshing.
In addition to the bird drawings and the abstractions, the exhibit also includes several large-scale collages made of recycled plastics entitled “Trash Bag Trees.” Made in 1995 while Iliescu was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, these show the artist’s abiding interest in her natural surroundings and in the language of abstract visual form.
Sanda Iliescu lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her work is currently on exhibit in “Picasso and Friends” at Les Yeux du Monde gallery in Charlottesville. Other paintings, drawings, and collages she has made were shown in New York’s 2014 Cutlog art fair, at Richmond’s 2013 “Knowing How to See” exhibit, and in two group shows at Gallery Molly Krom, both in 2013: “The Hiding Places are (Utterly) Empty” and “Flights of Love.” In addition to painting and drawing, she creates art installations for public spaces, often with students at the University of Virginia, where she teaches art and design. Her public projects, all in Charlottesville, include the 2013 ephemeral installation “SNOWBALLS on STEPS (for David Hammons),” the 2011 mural project “UN-PAINTING: From Yellow to White,” and the 2010 “Lines of Darkness and Light,” in which Iliescu shrouded the columns of Jefferson’s Rotunda in dark veils to mourn a student’s death.
