Dive In

Where the blue waters caress and also hold secrets, where the plants swim and sway, where secrets lie deep, both angels and demons may sleep…this is the sort of visual poetry C. Fodoreanu’s Ode to the Lake Sacalaia holds in its depths. If the lake inspires the artist’s creations, so does his creation inspire such visions in others.

An ancient Roman town lies on the deep silty bottom of this unsually deep freshwater lake in Romanian Transylvania.  Also resting there are the bones of divers who went in search of that almost mythical place and did not come back to the surface. And surely drifting there, too, are the remains of Fodoreanu’s childhood, his history, his dreams, and the circles and eddys of the artist’s self-discovery and promise.

There are photographs, some old and appropriately slightly watermarked; some large and bright in royal and midnight blues. Pedestal towers, with tree like markings, stand in a darkened back gallery. Each contains images of trees and water illuminated within viewing portholes. Behind this forest of pedestals, a projected image of branches and shoreline dances on the wall. On the ground are rune-like markings, vestages of a more distant past.

Projected images of water lap in an intimate deep blue on another such pedestal, a low bench allows the viewer to sit and contemplate the rhythm of the water, and resist the compulsion to dive in. Across the gallery, wavering cloth sheets hang from the ceiling, a circular spinning dance evoking the ripples on water.

Some of the photographic images are haunting, ephermeral, shadows of disconnected limbs and torsos in a gauzy film of sepia light. Others, are taken “From Far Away” and hung, pigment on rag, mounted on board, a landscape series seemingly taken from space, from the outer reaches of time. Then there is the large scale, board mounted pigment on rag image titled “Stars” which dances with blue on blue light.

A poem by the artist leads into the last gallery, dimly lit, and hung with large-scale blue images of diving and water so liquidly depicted that once again, the viewer wants to find that water and dive on in.  “We are the same, me and you, you and me…” Fodoreanu’s poem reads… and if we are the same, can we swim together in these crystaline yet dark depths?

For a little while, we can imagine that we do.

Ode to the Lake Sacalaia is at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at CSULA through August 30th. A walk through by the artist will take place that day. Don’t forget to join in and take a dip.

• Genie Davis, photos by Genie Davis