Spirited Land and Flowering Bodies

Through my land, I will show you the miracles of our bodies. And through the body, I will show you the marvels of this land. Wild. Violent. Filling. Emptying. Free. What is in our bodies to be told has come from the land — on the page, I become the creator of both, and I press my pen into them, like a rib.
— Natalie Diaz

C Fodoreanu will paint you queer love letters of a land left behind, drawing us through ancient icons and snapshots of Transylvanian flowers, through faded family photos and himself, until finding a form in essential objects (rope, metal, water, raw wood) like strokes in air that summon a place, the village with its halos and its forest, lost and found. A doctor and an artist, a Romanian émigré to California, he understands in the tender folds and hidden depths what a body can carry.

But first, a miracle…

From February 15 to March 12, 1699, an icon of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus painted by Luca of Iclod in the village of Nicula, Transylvania wept.

Moved by this wetly lachrymose marvel, hundreds and then thousands of pilgrims over centuries came to this otherwise nondescript village about 50km outside Cluj. For the hordes of pilgrims, the peasants of Nicula began to paint icons on glass in the essential simplicity of expression in their linework, through their ‘writings’, they birthed a lasting tradition in Romanian folk art, practiced far into the 20th century, that is, until the very last icon painter of Nicula, Gheorghe Feur.

Gheorge Feur is C Fodoreanu’s great-grandfather. And Nicula their ancestral village.

Leaving Romania for California, Fodoreanu like all migrants carried his ghosted homeland in his memories and, like all humans, we carry the stories and struggles of our ancestors in our blood. What does it mean to be the last practitioner of a lost artform? What does it mean to be an artist descended from that last practitioner?

The essential flatness of art from the Medieval period, and which the icons of Nicula reflect in their aesthetic, always felt to me a dispensation of the corporeal and the worldly for the greater importance for its practitioners of the spiritual. The icons of Nicula are particularly prized for how they endeavor to reduce complex meanings into simple lines. These holy figures are depicted not as three-dimensional humans, tangible bodies moving through time and space, but through the pure grace of their souls.

Icons in the context of Orthodox Christianity window into the divine. The image summons its subject and reveals not just a body but the deeper spiritual truth harnessed to the figure. And because Christ took a body, the Incarnation, thus the divine can be held by the object of an icon. One of the things that made the Nicula icons at their height so beloved was the loose, living wrist that made them, ‘wrote’ them to use the parlance of the icon makers as if tracing the name of God. We often imagine spirit animating flesh, but truly here flesh is animating spirit.

As does Fodoreanu. Reflecting on his great-grandfather’s icons through a series of paintings, the artist oh-so subtly changes these religious scenes into something just a whisper more carnal. You might miss the saucy shifts if you weren’t looking, but it’s worth looking. At the Catholic Church around the corner, I’m sure more than one male parishioner perks at the loin-clothed Christ and his half-nudie martyrs and feels that flicker of desire that can only be found for some men in the bodies of other men. And that lick of lust is here in Fodoreanu’s paintings. This is the artist painting his own being and its experiences into the inheritance of this lost religious tradition.

From spirit to body, from body to land, and back to spirit, this cycle and its unity circulates in the work of Fodoreanu. With all the freighted memories and fraught histories, soulful fervor and unkempt desires that can be found there.

The back and forth between body and land appears here in Fodoreanu’s series of early photographs of the artist’s body overlaying snapshots of flowers taken on a homecoming trip back to Nicula, found meandering up the hill to the village’s ancient monastery. The discovery of one’s own body with the rediscovery of one’s homeland. (Fodoreanu migrated to the US from Romania after high school, and had been educated in the US, from med school to art school, ever since.) Alongside these are faded family photographs dissolving into dried flowers, memories like those country herbariums, dandelions wines and winter flavors, past life remembered in crumbling forms.

And as if reflecting in space upon the simple lines of grace in the icons, Fodoreanu creates a sculptural tableau in the gallery. Inspired by the elemental forces found in Arte Povera, the artist with hanging, knotted ropes, a gold and a silver ball, a pan of water, and a piece of wood, gnarled bark naked in its origins, summons the village and it’s rough hewn labors, the halos of the saints painted there, it’s nearby lake and forest, all of it and us being held by the frame of art.

The separation of our bodies from our spirits and memories, and any of those being cut away from where we come from, those lands where we blossomed, is all just an illusion, loose veils sheared away with the dreams and memories, graven images and essential forms summoned here by C Fodoreanu.

Andrew Berardini is a writer and curator from Los Angeles. His past curated exhibitions include presentations at MOCA Los Angeles, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Castello di Rivoli (Turin), and the Pavilion of Estonia at the 2019 Venice Biennale. A longtime contributor to Artforum and the former critic of the LA Weekly, he is currently contributing editor at Art-Agenda, Mousse, and Momus. He is the author of catalogue essays for the Whitney Biennial, the Hammer Museum, and SFMOMA, and is a recipient of the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writing Grant and the Red Bull Detroit Writers Residency.

Exhibition essay for writings, solo exhibition at level of service not required (LOS/NR), La Jolla, CA, 2025.

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