Cor Fabrica, mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture by C Fodoreanu, photographed from below against blue sky and scattered cumulus; the figure's torso and outstretched arm with wing-like ginkgo-leaf cuts read as silver-edged anatomical line-drawing dissolving into the sky.

A pediatrician making icons of the body.

Two ways of looking at the body. One is the medical diagram, drawn outside-in—the archive that runs from Galen through Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) to the textbook still open on my desk.

The other is the written icon, carried inside-out—the Romanian tradition of writing icons on glass that ended with my great-grandfather, Clopotarul, the Bellringer, the last of his line in the village of Nicula, Transylvania. You do not paint an icon. You write it.

My work unfolds where these traditions meet.

The Work

Six Ways In

lost trees by C Fodoreanu — four-column installation in wood, glass, and light with painted angiograms.
The diagram
fabrica
The body as medicine draws it: opened, measured, laid flat. Vesalius in mirror-polished steel, in hanging silk, in painted angiograms.
 Archangels Michael and Gabriel by C Fodoreanu — large painting of two haloed angels in orange robes among stylized roses.
The icon
writings
The body written rather than depicted, the way Nicula wrote it — paintings, the stitched cloth that frames a saint, a family revived from old negatives.
 dive #2, from blues — figure descending into deep blue water.
The in-between
sacalaia
The body in water, read twice at once: entering from above and floating below, flora from one side, cloud from the other.
 hugs on wall by C Fodoreanu — papers each embraced by a healthcare worker, keeping the negative space of one act of care.
The keeping
rooms
The body in another’s hands — the exam room, the held heart, the hug, the community that remembers who you are when illness takes your name.
 sub-limin-al by C Fodoreanu — pixelated figures emerging from a field of colored particles.
The veil
seen / unseen
The body bare to the gaze, and altered by it. The seen is never what it was before it was seen.
 a page from Zîcere — three books of poems in a made dialect, under the name CÎNDE.
The saying
Zîcere
Before the image, the word — three books of poems in a made dialect, where the whole practice first said itself.
Cor Fabrica, after Vesalius, donated to the Hillcrest Community Foundation and sited on the Pride Promenade in San Diego, awaiting unveiling.
Collected by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Harvey Milk Photo Center, and Printed Matter.
Essays and criticism by Andrew Berardini, Shana Nys Dambrot, Seph Rodney, Peter Frank, Andrew Woolbright, and others — in Hyperallergic, Whitehot, and HereIn.
Other Work
Art Director, level of service not required (LOS/NR), La Jolla — sixteen exhibitions in under two years, among them a solo of video-art pioneer Frank Gillette.
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the white flag — silk flag bearing human-body imagery flying against a blue desert sky, Chocolate Drop, Twentynine Palms, CA, 2021

From beat to beat — the count the Bellringer kept, the count I keep.