Art Review: Human foibles inform Edwards' 'Themes'

"Pinocchio's Dream" by Larry Edwards

Larry Edwards' exhibition in the Mallory Wurtzburger area of Dixon Gallery and Gardens is titled "3 Themes," and indeed it's evident that there is a "Pinocchio" theme, a "battle" theme and a "freak carnival" theme.

We might as well consign those threads to the category of fussy detail, however, because Edwards' overarching theme in this show is, as it always has been, the perverse psychology that underlies the foibles of lust, desire, greed, vanity, ache for power, violence, self-aggrandizement; all the things that make us so gloriously, riotously ignoble and sweetly, sadly, terribly human. That's a lot of burden for 14 works of art to bear, but the pieces in this well-edited exhibition carry their responsibility with wicked aplomb.

'The Phoenix Pinocchio' by Larry Edwards

The exhibition will be displayed through July 24. There will be a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday at the Dixon.

Edwards, who has been an artistic and creative presence in Memphis for what seems like forever, taught at the University of Memphis from 1978 to 1997, when he retired, having served as chairman of the art department from 1978 to 1982. His influence on many students over the years was not so much in technique as in the insistence that a steady, integral vision keeps an artist on an unwavering path toward individual achievement and singularity.

And there are few artists in the region more singular than Larry Edwards. It's shocking that this artist, who turns 80 on Aug. 1, has not had gallery representation in Memphis. Are dealers and patrons alike so put off by his gleefully sardonic, darkly humorous view of human nature, one he shares with such notables as Hogarth, Daumier, Grosz and Guston? Do we turn away so easily from the distorting, truth-telling mirror he holds up to our private and public vices?

Edwards is an allegorist, and as many allegorists have done since the time of Aesop, he frequently cloaks his jaundiced commentary in the guise of fabulistic animal set pieces and caricature. Yet he has drawn back from the willful grotesqueries in which he once indulged , though in this exhibition the pieces in the "freak show" series come closest to that old wanton exuberance.

In the "Pinocchio" series, however, Edwards, his focus razor-sharp, reveals a universal sense of insight that is almost Olympian in detachment yet passionately committed to the flaying of ambition and hypocrisy. Pinocchio, the puppet turned into a little boy whose nose grows when he tells a lie, is depicted with his legendary proboscis at full liar's length, yet he's also a contradictory hero of sorts, a childish Robin Hood gone bad, a folklore trickster and imp who manifests all the slanted and bent virtues of the benevolent/malevolent Pied Piper of our best and worst dreams.

And in one piece (the most political), Pinocchio leads, à la the Pied Piper, a parade of knights' helmets that sprout blatantly phallic noses from the visors, while above float balloons with Edwards' favorite pig and flamingo figures, while the hero himself waves an American flag. In "Pinocchio's Dream," the titular character sleeps in his little bed, which is straddled by a pink upholstered chair above which drift little Pinocchios on fire, their puppet string being severed by free-floating pairs of scissors, a dream of paranoia and guilt.

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Larry Edwards, "3 Themes"

At Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 4339 Park, through July 24. Reception, "Art after Dark," 6-9 p.m. May 19. Call 761-5250.

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