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On January 8, 1996, the artist, Sanda Iliescu, began to keep “a kind of visceral, visual journal,” “marking each day by making a self-portrait.” The last entry is dated September 10, 1997. Clearly she did not make a portrait each day: “Sometimes I work on the same face for many days in a row.” The quotations are from her own writing (she often writes on the portraits themselves). In writing this essay, I considered a numbered subset of this series: one hundred drawings chosen by Iliescu from a collection that includes some nine hundred studies. I call this piece an interface. Doing it has entailed facing one hundred faces many times over until I catch their drift, unravel their stitches, penetrate their surface, discover her face, hum their lyrics, touch their scars, find the parts that she has effaced and erased and feel their dread reverberations in my own face.

I don’t think she was aware, when she started, that she was entering the selfsame selva oscura as Dante did on his way to Hell, but the drawings show that she discovered this very quickly. “I decided to go ahead with this—to do a self-portrait every day. To start my day that way. For the past week I’ve been doing them in my sketchbook,” is the innocuous inscription on entry number 1, although the “I decided to go ahead with this,” may reflect some small trepidation that the enterprise may be more than merely straightforward. The face in the drawing is fluidly and sensuously rendered, the features faintly limned, the eyes unseeing, but the right ear sketched in careful detail as though listening for an answer. The head is tilted, cautiously attentive: what have I set in motion?, she seems to be asking.

Then, two days later, on January 10th, a death mask—the impression left on a shroud after years of interment, in the color of earth. Immediately thereafter she is resurrected, but how changed from the clear-faced, delicate woman of entry 1! The face doesn’t flow anymore; it is stolid, deliberately coarsened as though she has become a peasant, without hope. The graceful curves are again discernable in the next drawing, but the face is slashed by swift strokes of line and shadow that almost obliterate the right eye and initiate the cataract theme that regularly recurs throughout the series: it is an embattled face, grim but resolute.

On the fifth face, she writes, “So today I felt a kind of resignation and a sort of calmness, too. I did a lot of erasing—not an angry kind of erasing but erasing as a positive and delicate sort of thing. And then I put today’s face next to yesterday’s and saw that the face of today is much smaller. I don’t know what to make of these changes in the size of my face.” The size difference is explained for the most part by the erasures, guided perhaps by an unconscious decision that less face is more manageable and that it is only bearable to see half as much (the right eye has been erased).

The face that follows is a bit bland. The pupils of the large eyes are almost opaque and the lips are slightly stretched, maybe quizzically, if not in an incipient smile. But the entire thing is colored with a thin yellow wash that suggests jaundice. Is she telling us that her take on this particular face is jaundiced, or perhaps recommending that we see it that way. This assumption seems warranted by the sequence, the erasures and the downsizing of the previous drawing. Jaundice connotes bitterness or resentment. Of what is she bitter or resentful? What bitterness or resentment might she be urging upon us?

Thursday, July 25, 1996
I am interested in the “look” of women’s faces—faces I see on TV, at the grocery store, in a parking lot, in the lady’s room, in the hospital. Each face is unique at any point in time. Its movement, look, visual priorities change every second. The idea of painting someone’s definitive portrait seems preposterous. A face has hundreds of transient faces embedded in it. Still, there are stable features that make one recognize a person, even after many years and much aging. Each face has its own weight, a sort of specific
density. This remains, while features, movements, attitudes shift.

Friday, July 26, 1996

I ask myself: how does one draw a face? Is it still possible
to make the trace of a face, after photography, after film and video, after computer graphics? I am unsure and find no answers; I grope and stumble. Still, I persist. I am drawn to the face. I draw it, which means I imagine it in some way, every day.

Yellow also figures dramatically in entry number 21, a vacant eyed, staring, but resigned face surrounded by yellow flowers that resemble daffodils. From the top to the bottom of the page, scrawled across the face until it becomes a dense, unintelligible tangle is the sentence, “Joy is sometimes possible,” as though she were desperately reminding herself, or reminding herself amidst her desperation. The thicket that these words form at the bottom of the page is a graphic correlative of dissolution into tears. Entry 22 takes the next step: the entire right side of the face is now a flower (a yellow daffodil?); on the left side, the yellow wash is muddied green, and drips past a skeletal mouth to the chin. The face is half garish flower and half poison green grotesquery. It tells us about the way recalling and yearning for an absent joy can complicate and intensify grief.

Returning to the initial series after a yellow detour into coming attractions, we have entry 7, in which the artist begins the use of a species of crosshatching that produces the impression of iron filings following lines of emotional force. It is as though the energy in the facial muscles has compelled the sketchy lines to assume their distinctive shape and direction. In this drawing, the mouth is a stoical slit while the eyes are vortices of intense conflict between weeping and not weeping, seeing and not seeing, loving and hating. The conflict is resolved in number 8, where the lines of force are formed into a static symmetry yielding a face that is darkened and rigid against the painful emotion of the previous image, both eyes plainly visible for once, but staring and immobile.

In entry 9, the crosshatching deviates somewhat from its erstwhile symmetry but the face is desolate with reddened eyes and lips; this is the limit of her endurance: the next image begins a process of effacement. The right side of the face and nose recede into the pink wash. There is still hectic activity on the left cheek, and the left eye stares accusingly. The wash is retained in number 11, but the features are scarcely there. Only the inveterate mouth is any semblance of itself. By the time we get to number 12, nothing is left to fill the flaccid outline of a face. The effacement is complete. In entry 13, the ascent has begun, but only barely: the oval is darker and better defined, but the features are limned like a very pallid ghost’s.

Effacement remains dominant in entry 13. But the features are coming back. The cross hatching in this piece is effected by scratching color away instead of positive sketching, so that the strokes are white against the burnt sienna wash, a brilliant reversal that connotes a fundamental emotional transformation. What these images convey is the almost impenetrable and unutterably complex experience of not being able to face something that is mirrored in one’s face and as a result, having, for a time, to expunge the face itself. Obscured behind several layers of scrim is a sleeper only beginning to emerge into wakefulness. When she comes awake, in entry 15, the crosshatching is back, burning in one feature at a time, as a photographer would in the darkroom. The right eye is there, the nose more faintly, and the mouth is vertically bisected, the left half definite and right still faded. A negligible line defines the right facial boundary but as yet, there is no demarcation on the left. This is a hypnopompic face, made of cobwebs that must be cleared on the way to reintegration.

In entry 16, the awakening shifts to the lower half of the face—lips and nostrils animated by lines of force that suggest an infant’s nocturnal rooting for the breast; the accompanying gnomic lines read: “Again, I get back to the same old thing: sticking to something (doesn’t matter) hanging on or hanging in. It’s also a matter of simplicity. Everything I like (what a terrible word, “like”) is in some way simple or reduced. That’s why I like silhouettes of things and cut-outs and staples.”

Her words contradict the testimony of these images. Even when they are silhouettes or black masks, as in images 41 and 43, they are never simple. Perhaps this is a part of what she finds difficult to face—that, no matter the simplicity of intention or the suppressed sophistication in the execution, the object betrays the underlying intricacy of feeling. Further, even the simpler images partake of a complex totality because they occupy a place in the series, like lyrical passages of music that follow or precede a densely orchestrated or rhythmically convoluted movement.

And this brings us to a modest inventory of the artist’s means and materials. She draws so well as to be able to ignore technique and allow her visual invention to derive almost directly from affect. At will, she reaches into the materials that surround her for whatever the current image requires. Sometimes it is a wash or color highlight, sometimes a stitching of staples, sometimes crosshatching, and sometimes, cut out shapes from plastic garbage bags. She is audacious (and desperate) enough to remove her face from us while forcing us to remember and anticipate it. She spins her face as though it were a fabric, stitches it, staples it, ages it with the texture of crepe, performs skin grafts, and other kinds of plastic surgery on it and sometimes disguises it with theatrical makeup. Her faces are stitched together, bandaged, etched, opaque, transparent, and ineluctably there, but not all there.

We know about lawyers who represent themselves and doctors who treat themselves, but what about artists who draw themselves? Shall we say that an artist who draws herself has an enigma for a model? Shall we read her the cautionary tale of Narcissus or recite a relevant line from Yeats: “Empty eye-balls knew/ That knowledge increases unreality, that/ Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show”? Is this why so many of the self-portraits in this series have empty eyeballs? We can say only that Sanda Iliescu’s perseverance after realizing how daunting was the self inflicted facing of herself for many consecutive days, yielded an astonishing corpus. When such courage is vouchsafed to a master of visual language, the result is a pictorial record of complex states of mind such as has not been attempted before. No greater justice can be done to this series than to reproduce them all as faithfully as possible for publication as a book.

Dr. William Fried is a psychoanalysist, photographer and appreciator of art. He lives and practices in New York city.

Monday, May 1, 2006
I call this project Timeline—a long line stretching backwards in time, connecting today with a moment three days or three years ago. In a very simple way, Timeline is teaching me how to draw, which is not at all simple. It teaches me how to see. Also how to draw out, and how to move away from myself. I have learned to leave out the sensational or startling and to return to the simple and familiar. The most banal realities lead to intricate journeys: the journey of a line, of a few dots, perhaps some office staples or fragments of a plastic grocery bag… Yet Timeline always returns to the difficulties of the face, of having to face oneself. A self-portrait. How can I make one, knowing those others, knowing for instance the ones Rembrandt has traced for us? I keep looking at his sequence of faces: Small Self Portrait (1627), Self Portrait Bareheaded (1629), Self Portrait with Tousled Hair (1629), Self Portrait, Open-Mouthed (1630), Self Portrait with Hand on Hip (1631), Self Portrait as an Oriental (1634), Self Portrait Drawing on an Etching Plate (1658)… In Rembrandt’s etching known as La Petit Tombe all lines point to a little boy, about four years old, scratching a line in the sand. Perhaps this too is a self-portrait. “Looking is not as simple as it looks,” writes Ad Reinhardt. Timeline (or a small line scratched in the sand) teaches me this simple fact: looking is not so simple…

Sanda Iliescu is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Art at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. For more information on this work contact Molly Merson at Vagabond Gallery, New York, New York (www.vagabondgallery.net).