Untitled 1970

This untitled construction, by Mihai Olos, is made of wood, and as you can see, it’s an accumulation. The process is all about the making, the joining, the repetition. The material—wood—is so crucial here, lending a kind of warmth and organic feel to what might otherwise be a cold, geometric form. If you look closely, you can see the individual sticks, each one slightly different, bearing the mark of the hand. There’s this sense of the artist working, adjusting, building, with no clear end in sight. The whole form is like a visual poem, each stick a word, each layer a verse. It’s hard not to think of artists like Sol LeWitt, with their systematic structures, or even Eva Hesse, with her use of repeated forms and industrial materials. What Olos does, though, is to imbue that kind of systematic structure with something much more human. It’s about embracing the open-ended and contingent aspects of art.