THE GARDEN OF SECRETS

SCAPE celebrates its 20th anniversary with Lawrence Fodor’s solo exhibit, Il Giardino dei Segreti

Lawrence Fodor, a painter and photographer with studios in Los Angeles and Santa Fe, New Mexico, travels often to Italy. While visiting Rome in 2022, he happened upon the frescoed dining room from the Villa of Livia in the Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Massimo. The frescoes, a magical garden painted between 30-20 BCE, lost to time and not unearthed until 1863, once graced the walls of a semi-subterranean dining room in a secondary residence of Livia Drusilla and Caesar Augustus in Prima Porta, just outside of Rome. The frescoes were removed from the original site to the Diocletian Baths in Rome in 1951, then installed in a dedicated room in the Palazzo Massimo in 1998.

Absorbed as artist and viewer by the resonant beauty of these paintings—alone in a clandestine meeting with the endlessly sublime—I marveled at the unimaginable possibility these frescoes had endured, undiscovered for nearly two millennium, still echoing the voices of antiquity and radiating the resilient spirit of nature through the indelible integrity of painting.

—Lawrence Fodor

Fodor describes his encounter with these frescoes as a pivotal point in his career. “Within this room I discovered a refuge from the extreme weather and hustle in a modern city, as it must have been for Livia and Augustus, who entertained their guests while escaping the summer heat or winter chill in their secret garden. Today, as then, it is a gracious temple, an impossibly romantic illusion, verdant with impeccable stylizations while accurately detailing a multitude of flora and fauna—umbrella pines, oak, fir, quince, pomegranate, myrtle, date palms, roses, poppies, acanthus. Virtually every plant, bush, or tree is blooming or bearing fruit in elegant rhythms despite a seasonally unattainable occurrence. Everywhere birds perch or careen in a gauzy blue-grey sky.”

The artist, struck by the profound nature of the human connections between painting and gardens from ages past, was stirred to write in his journal: “I oscillated between meaning and memory, compelled to excavate links bridging the vestiges of art history to contemporary invention. In this moment of heightened awareness, unexpected connections coalesced. I saw implicit alliances to my artistic practice of suggestion, to my environmental concerns, and to my fingers deeply engaged in the soil of my gardens, real and imagined. I saw a body of work to meaningfully fuse past and present—orchestrating and aligning that which is inherited with that which is invented.”

These paintings and photographs celebrate the essential relevance of the primal human connection with nature and converge to mirror and embody a flourishing landscape garnered from history, translating the vital implications of an accumulated past united with a concerned present to beckon a sustained future.

—Lawrence Fodor

SCAPE will be exhibiting these referenced paintings by Lawrence Fodor March 3–April 5, 2023. The exhibition will feature these paintings on full-scale, digital muraled walls that reference the frescoes and inspiration for the work. 

While painting is Fodor’s primary medium, photography and painting were fused and combined to shape the matrix on which these paintings will be presented. Multiple-exposure photographs—layered images of the frescoes, gardens in Rome, the artist’s own gardens, along with his written notes and works in progress—line the walls, implying an architecture of collective history and memory.  

Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy. 

—Albert Einstein

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