preamble

preamble is a multi-component installation produced for Liminal Forms, Fodoreanu's MFA thesis exhibition at The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, in 2023. Two ten-foot oil drawings on butcher paper anchor the work, accompanied by two stacked pedestals — one white, one black. Where its companion piece assemble takes the historical archive of the medical body as its source — Vesalius, the dissected figure, the anatomical line — preamble turns instead to the present-tense experience of being ill.

The work proposes that disease is not, finally, an event happening to a single body. It is a temporary dispersal of the self into the network of people who hold the patient's meaning when the patient cannot — family, friends, and the healthcare workers who, in Fodoreanu's working life as a pediatrician, sit on the other side of the exam-room threshold. preamble registers that dispersal in scale, in materiality, and in the choice of butcher paper as a support: a substrate associated with the kitchen, the table, the body's daily sustenance, here taken up to ten feet in height. The work and its companion together establish the philosophical argument the artist would later name explicitly — the proposal of a "new humanism" grounded in the shared experience of carrying a body.

The disease has profound effects on both the body and the mind. The personality and identity of one while ill change as well. What is defining a healthy person seems tampered, almost annihilated while in a state of disease. The life trajectory as planned, as projected is either temporarily or permanently changed.

The lines of continuity which remind us on a daily morning who we are today and how we connect to ourselves of yesterday, of last week, of last month, of last year or decade, are broken up, interrupted. An alternative space opens in which the only goal is to heal. Everything from before seems to be placed on hold — not enjoying sweet moments of life, not adding to the sandcastle of bettering oneself, not opening the eyes up towards the sun.

While being in this alternative space so bordered, so well defined, all the energy is shifted towards an energy to heal. And in a way things become simple — the path narrows, and the ultimate destination is tragically clearer — an end that one in a process of disease is trying to avoid, wishing a quick return to the way things were before.

But this newly open space also holds people who carry the important role of reminding us of who we are, and what we mean. As the meaning of ourselves dissolves by the poisons of disease, as we get lost in the battle towards the normal, the healed, it seems that who we are dissipates into this space outside of our body, outside of our mind, into the sacred space of dear ones. The loved ones of family and friends, and the people dedicated to promoting life and keeping diseases at bay.

These are the ones rearranging the meaning of life adjusting a trajectory spun by disease into the one familiar, the one from the day before the diagnosis. These are the ones holding messages and clues about these alternative spaces that take shape when one is ill, spaces reflected in beautiful shapes and graphs, colored paper with regular lines, dots, beats, and geographies of body measurements, which even though looking sterile and clean, reflect a deep history of human pain and transformation.

When we are not ourselves, we get lost and we rely on our fellow humans to sustain, including artists, to allow the process of healing to take place. Because health only happens in teams, surrounded by people who know us and remind us of who we are, and what we are made of, keeping us in line with who we were before getting sick. An artistic endeavor of healing, as art bonds everything together promoting life.