Notes on the Practice

I grew up in the village of Nicula, in Transylvania, along the road that thousands of Orthodox Christian pilgrims walk each summer to pray before the wonder-working Madonna of Nicula. Many of the households along that road sold basil or flowers to the pilgrims to make a quick living. My family did not. We made icons in the old reverse-glass tradition and placed them on the grass in front of our house, free for whoever wanted to take one. My maternal great-grandfather, Gheorghe Feur, was the last known painter in our family lineage of writing icons. As a child, my siblings and I would compete over whose icons were getting picked up by strangers — who was best, whose were chosen — always trying to make them colorful and playful and serious. That was the first time I made art for someone else.

In Romanian Orthodox tradition, you do not paint an icon. You write it. The word of God can be inscribed; it cannot be depicted. The title of my current paintings, writings, takes that injunction seriously and plays with it. It is also, in part, a way of not letting go.

The icon painters on glass avoided drawing a straight line with the help of a ruler. They believed that using a ruler — real or fictive — to generate perfect shapes and forms was straying away from beauty. The line drawn freehand better represents life, because it contains the heartbeat of the painter, with its perceived slight irregularities. The clumsiness stops being clumsy and is instead elevated to a norm. Avoiding mastery of the perfect line is an assumed artistic choice to express the living soul, the palpable life force — beauty. I think about that often. My formal art education, somewhat ironically, taught me to distrust beauty when it commands attention so completely that it obfuscates the message. The peasant painters of Nicula understood something about beauty that the academy has had to spend a long time relearning.

I work across painting, photography, sculpture, video, installation, and creative writing. The icon paintings continue the family lineage by reaching back to it: I am painting after the last painter, taking up what my great-grandfather closed. The photography and sculpture move the other way. They place queerness, intimacy, faith, the body, and the fragility of life into a conversation the icon tradition was never built for. The work pursues a poetry of light, and explores the human body as a metaphor for how we relate to the surrounding nature and to each other — to mythology, play, love, memory, the fleetingness of time. What I am asking, in all of it, is what an inherited form can carry. The icon was made to hold the sacred. I want to know what it can hold now.

I am also a practicing pediatrician, and I work openly from the understanding that medicine and art shape each other in both directions. Medicine lays bare the human condition. It strips the divisive dressings — creed, race, class — and what is left is the body itself. Heart attacks happen to everybody. A birth happens in every family. A bad diagnosis or a cure happens to everybody. As patients move through my office, I notice the broad strokes of humanity. Out of that comes the unifying mission of the work: I want to say we are all the same.

In my installation works, I have tried to give that recognition a form. Assemble began with the privilege, and the blight, of holding a heart in my hands — and with the question of what it would mean to evolve, from that intimacy with the body, a new humanism. Preamble began with the idea that a disease is a temporary dispersal of the self into the network of people who hold the patient’s meaning when the patient cannot. Both works are about what bodies hold and what they cannot, and about the labor of staying close enough to find out.

The Sacalaia photographs were made over many years at a deep, mythologized lake in Transylvania where I spent my childhood summers in a rowboat, looking down in hopes of catching a glimpse of the submerged Roman basilica that legend places at the bottom. The work is, on one level, my remembrance of that lake. It is also about the children I see in my pediatrics practice, who begin their lives with great ideals and whose ideals are slowly worn down by everything an unforgiven life carries. In the analogy with the lake, only some of these children manage to swim to the top, realizing their full potential. Others are getting lost in the depths. Both belong to the work. The medical practice, in turn, is sharpened by the questions the art keeps asking — about what bodies hold and what they cannot, about the loss of potential, about who is remembered.

If I am only a doctor, and I keep that knowledge at home, what is the point of having it. If I am only an artist, and the work sits in my walls or my garage, what is the point of making. The two practices are how I have answered, for myself, that question. Each is a way of attending to the body and to what the body carries. Each is a way of placing what is inherited — the tradition of writing icons, the tradition of holding hearts in your hands — into a conversation it was not, originally, built for. The work is meant to be slow. I am asking the viewer to stay with it for as long as a clinical encounter takes — long enough that something other than first impression has time to form.

— C Fodoreanu