Statement

I am a practicing pediatrician and a multidisciplinary artist. I work in painting, drawings, photography, sculpture, video, installation, and creative writing, and I direct level of service not required, a contemporary gallery in La Jolla.

I work towards a poetry of light — across mediums, across surfaces or shines. There is nothing visual that is not, first, light — held by a painted ground, returned from polished steel, written down as an icon. The work receives the light already there and shapes it back in like a poem.

The practice gathers at the intersection of two long looking-at-the-body traditions. One is the persistent inheritance of medical seeing, caught between stillness and motion — and the bodies it has rendered from drawing to scan through the centuries. The other is the closed tradition of ‘writing’ icons that ended with my great-grandfather, the last in this lineage in the village of Nicula, Transylvania. Where medical seeing moves outside in, the icon moves inside out: the sacred carried to the surface, the body held whole rather than opened. I transfer both inheritances with me, across mediums, into a conversation neither was built for — closeness, queerness, intimacy, what does not get revealed, and what crosses the line when it does.

The work attends closely. What I find is the body held in opposite tensions at once: resilience and fading, sacred and dissected, the posture of life inside the moment of decay. Often the body is in water, as in a falling drop, as the medium of in-between states. And inside these tensions, a structure every life moves through: being born, falling in love, finding a passion, getting ill, and passing on. What changes are the bodies.

A new humanism rests there.

— C Fodoreanu