“The Hand and the Soul” is a title that can present itself as literal or metaphoric, abstract or concrete. In the case of the newest exhibit at the University Art Museum, it is both the exhibit’s title and a book edited by Assoc. Art and Architecture Prof. Sanda Iliescu.
The exhibit’s full title is The Hand and the Soul: LeWitt, Slutzky, Illiescu. Prominently placed directly across from the exhibit’s entrance is a wall painting that follows the process set out by Sol LeWitt, a conceptual artist in his own right as well as one of Illiescu’s mentors. The wall was divided into 300 squares and each square has exactly one line. Nine students and Illiescu split up the squares so that each had 30 lines to draw. The lines are curved or straight, horizontal, diagonal or vertical, continuous or broken. Together these 300 lines make up a complicated, interwoven piece of conceptual art.
“I did a lot of straight lines,” said Supriya Sudan, a fourth-year Architecture student and museum intern. “Curved lines are really hard to get right.”
That seems counterintuitive, but when your line has to be absolutely perfect and absolutely the same no matter how many times you trace over it, Sudan’s statement is more understandable.
“Your line is communicating with every other line,” Sudan said. “It’s part of the whole communication process.”
Nine students, Iliescu and one of LeWitt’s assistants, Roland Lusk communicated a good deal to ensure that the wall was completed according to what they wanted it to look like. This includes perfect angles, level lines and no closed shapes that immediately attract the eye.
Robert Slutzky’s paintings on display are from the same generation of abstract art, featuring a similar democratic concept as the wall painting based on LeWitt. Each square inch in his painting is as important as the next. Just as no one section of the wall painting should immediately draw your eye, neither should any inch of Slutzky’s abstract paintings.
The concept of the exhibit is not only evident in its title, the wall painting and the abstract colors of Slutzky, but also in Iliescu’s works that are on display.
“The hand stands for making, creating and the aesthetic,” Illiescu said. “The soul stands for what is right and just in this world, from humans to the environment. Art is as much about ideas as it is about objects.”
The relationship between the quality of something’s goodness and the quality of its beauty is a prevalent theme throughout history. Fairytale witches might be beautiful, but they use their beauty to lure one into death and decay.
Iliescu takes things that might seem dull or boring and turns them into beautiful and evocative art. Her “kitchen table collages” feature pieces of paper bags from her son’s lunches, scraps of thought from her manuscript pages as well as swatches of fabric sewn together to create something that is both solid and aesthetic.
Iliescu’s other works on display featured eight out of 16 pieces in a series in which she wrote a poem regularly with her right hand, and backwards with her left hand on the same line. She would then erase the poem and start the whole process again one line down. She essentially created a formula or recipe for a style of art, much like LeWitt’s wall paintings. They allow the viewer to see not only the hand — the time, effort and practice that went into the poem art — but the soul as well, the piece of us that will always be dedicated to poetry and emotion.
Iliescu “is an unwavering reminder of why I love art: because at its core, it is the simple and beautiful act of making a mark,” said Rachel Singel, a fourth-year College student who contributed to the wall painting and the installation. “That mark may be solely for the individual, but it can also be for something more: a community, a cause, an artist being remembered.”
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