Il Giardino dei Segreti – The Garden of Secrets

I happened upon the frescoed dining room from the Villa of Livia in the Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Massimo while visiting Rome in 2022. 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. 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.

Absorbed as artist and viewer by the resonant beauty of these paintings—alone in a clandestine meeting with the endlessly sublime—I oscillated between meaning and memory, compelled to excavate links bridging the vestiges of art history to contemporary invention. 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. 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.

The work I make encompasses drawing, painting and photography, utilizing a variety of analogue and digital materials, tools and resources. While painting is my primary medium, photography and painting were fused and combined to shape the matrix on which these paintings are presented. Multiple-exposure photographs—layered images of the frescoes, gardens in Rome, my gardens, written notes and my work in progress—line the walls, implying an architecture of collective history and memory; a mirage of an archaic oasis. Articulating within this atmospheric setting are drawings as thought process, multiple-exposure photographs of gardens, larger paintings suggesting the psychological realm of gardens and landscape longing the essential role of nature in our lives, or the loss of thereof, and paintings on small boxes alluding to the symbolic and inherent significance of specific plants, blooms, fruits and birds in the frescoes.

The smaller paintings and drawings, cultivated as allegorical apertures of time and perception, function as harmonic intervals between the larger paintings and photographs. Paralleling the secrets embedded in Livia’s dining room and the misplaced insights of the past, the work emerges as visual records contemplating the illusions of these concealed relics—the bloom of an ancient poppy, a pomegranate picked in a forgotten garden, the song of the muted wren, the fragrance of an extinct rose.

Celebrating the essential relevance of the primal human connection with nature, the paintings and photographs from Il Giardino dei Segreti 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, 2022-23