writings

LOS/NR is thrilled to present writings, a solo exhibition by San Diego interdisciplinary artist and physician C Fodoreanu, on view from April 19 to May 26, 2025. This exhibition marks Fodoreanu’s first solo show in our gallery featuring a selection of paintings alongside photographs, single-channel video works, and a site-specific installation composed of water, wood, acrylics, and silks.

C Fodoreanu’s paintings depict religious motifs and stories inspired by his upbringing in the village of Nicula, Transylvania, the cradle of popular religious painting on glass. His maternal grand grandfather, Gheorghe Feur, was in fact the last known painter in the tradition of “writing” icons. Fodoreanu is re-creating these subliminal images into large works, each carrying a story significant to who he is as a person today. The title for the show is “writings,” in line with the old belief that one cannot paint the word of God, only write it again.

In writings, Fodoreanu assumes the “clumsiness” the icons of Nicula were so often reproach with, and paints almost as children would do when trying to render the world around them: not “the way one sees it” with foreshortenings and in perspective, but by an agglomeration of some characteristic features, structurally necessary to make the surrounding world recognizable. What looks like “clumsiness” to an eye familiar with academic painting is the very essentialization and simplification of forms, the abbreviation and eliminations peculiar to a rapid execution which make this kind of painting so attractive, so expressive and suggestive - it is a painting from which any insignificant detail has been eliminated. 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, generating perfect shapes and forms was straying away from beauty. The line drawn with a free hand better represents life as it contains the heartbeat of the painter with its perceived slight irregularities. The “clumsiness” stops being “clumsy” and instead is 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. Fodoreanu places these paintings in communication with his works in other mediums to parallel his perspective as an adult and physician of today to the old imagery flooding his childhood naïve to understanding self and others, adding a subtle disruptive queerness questioning the familiarity of these old told stories.