The Lake: Monsters & Metaphors

Consider the water. In myth and legend, folklore and world religion, poetry and song, psychoanalysis and cinema there is perhaps no element more endowed with meaning and magic and the mystical power to create and sustain life, than water. Water is an ancient symbol of boundless potential, the universal dissolver and healer, the cleanser in rituals of the soul, a metaphor for life itself as well as the gift of rain and the devastation of floods. It constitutes most of the physical body; while in Jungian dream interpretation, it represents the subconscious.

But then the water can also be a place — a very real place like Lake Sacalaia for example, where the boy who would become the artist spent many childhood summers, and which is itself a place of legend. Beguilingly known as the Loch Ness of Transylvania, its waters cover what was once a town. The spires of its Basilica are said to be visible in clear waters, tempting divers to explore the secrets of its depths, never to be seen again. This legend and so many like it from all around the world are not only muses of popular imagination, but analogous to how culture is formulated. These aquatic hauntings recall in mind and body the fear of the unknown and the depths of human memory, the shadow psyche and primordial energy from which our collective sense of ancestry emerged with the promise of secret treasure and the scent of mortal danger.

For Fodoreanu Lake Sacalaia also was and remains a site of sunshine and laughter, boats and families, quasi-feral adventures such as boys have in summer — all the better for being tinged with fear and the urgent need to make it back before dark when the spirits and monsters of the lake awaken. Many years and several lifetimes later, the lake remembered itself to the boy and to the artist, and he felt compelled to return to its waters and there with the clarity of hindsight to explore not only the terrain but its lingering influence on his imagination.

For a creator already attracted to the rhythm of ancient dialects and the power of pattern and mystery unfolding in his own psychical narrative, Fodoreanu’s is a journey in which we can all see ourselves reflected. Each of us has had a lake or something like it in our young lives — a place we knew as children that held fear and fascination, and perhaps still does. From the famous Bessie in Lake Erie, Ohio to kindred monsters in Bear Lake, Utah; White River, Arkansas; Lake Tianchi in China, Lake Manitoba in Canada; Memaloose Lake, Oregon; Fulk Lake, Indiana; Alkali Lake, Nebraska — the list goes on, and with remarkable consistency.

Before developing a photography practice concerned with abstract and concrete ways the body interacts with nature, Fodoreanu was a boy with a camera and a fascination for a submerged cathedral and the mysterious forces that guarded it. In the project that became this book, vintage photographs of the place, his family, and evocative, half-remembered moments combine with newly made images. Bodies fragmented and abstracted in the manner of memories, dreams or pieces of a softly humming puzzle are submerged in ripples and sun flares, clouds and reflections, awash in urgent ambiguity. What was intuitive to the child became intentional to the man. Did he already know back then that a version of himself would one day return?

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown LA. Formerly the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly from 2018–2024, she is a contributor to the Village Voice, Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications. She studied Art History at Vassar College, and is the recipient of the 2022 & 2024 Mozaik Future Art Writers Prize, the 2022 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, and the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year award for 2022.

First published in C Fodoreanu, Ode to the Lake Sacalaia, Cornel/Henry Art, 2022.

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