Art Review: Exhibit zeroes in on brief period in Faiers' career

Ted Faiers; "Lunaresque," oil on canvas; 1955

I promise that at the end of this year, when I'm compiling my list of best exhibitions of 2012, this show, "Ted Faiers: Flat Space, paintings and works on paper 1953-56," will be among those selected. Since 2002, David Lusk Gallery, which represents the artist's estate, has mounted a series of revelatory exhibitions that have cemented Faiers' reputation as a regional master of American Modernism.

A Canadian by birth, Faiers and his family moved, after a stint in New York, to Memphis, where he taught at the old Memphis Academy of Art from 1952 to 1977; he died in 1985, leaving behind hundreds, if not thousands, of paintings, prints and drawings from the 1940s through the early 1960s. Local art patrons primarily knew his later work, the stylized, satirical high-relief caricatures that dominated his output in the 1970s and '80s, work vastly different from what we have seen at David Lusk Gallery over the past decade.

Ted Faiers: "Space Machine," oil on canvas, 1955

Though all of these shows have been eye-opening and exquisite in myriad ways, "Flat Space" may be the most beautiful and the most integrated. Certainly by focusing on four years of Faiers' prolific career, this exhibition presents the opportunity to read the 10 paintings and 12 works on paper in terms of related and developing ideas, forms and themes.

It's not difficult to detect the artists whom Faiers admired at the time or had been looking at; touches of Arthur Dove, Miro, Klee, Motherwell and his contemporaries, the West Coast abstractionists influenced by American Indian motifs, abound. Yet Faiers had a way of transforming these influences through his particularly light touch, the oddness and angularity of his vision and a subtle sense of the comic.

The show's title, "Flat Space," refers to both the real and the perceived flatness of the picture. The rules of perspective, which it took European painters of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance several centuries finally to achieve and codify, were wiped out by Cezanne in the late 19th century. It was as if, in his celebrated landscapes and still lifes, Cezanne had waved his brush and said, "Perspective, begone," and there it went. Part of the progress of the 20th century lay in the increased flatness of paintings, until, with the mid-century Abstract Expressionists and other styles of abstraction, there was no differentiation between foreground and background; all pigment, all shapes, all activity occurred on one plane.

Thus, in a painting like "Lunaresque," presumably a moonlit landscape, Faiers offers a group of rounded, slightly bulbous forms in deep black and brilliant yellow and more sinewy, even jagged, defining shapes in gray as if they were all anchored (or hovered) in the same two-dimensional space. In the even more abstract "Space Machine," the show's largest piece at 67.5-by-46 inches, we feel the jazzy vibrancy of a new age being born amidst intricate and ambiguous contraptions and circuitry that seem half-benign and half humorously threatening. The vivid blues and reds that dominate this painting reflect the artist's effortless and never-failing sense of appropriate color.

Faiers never took to the dramatic bravado and gestural qualities of the New York expressionists like Pollock, Kline and de Kooning, whose work he must have seen first-hand. His method was much cooler, with impeccably smooth surfaces, meticulously defined forms and a general air of being in control. From another viewpoint, one could say that Faiers didn't take risks, though we must be careful to delineate what constitutes risk on an artist-by-artist basis.

Certainly in the works on paper -- and most in this show are treasures -- Faiers exercised less restraint, was a little looser, more simplified yet almost bolder. And as for risks, all artists take risks from the moment they sit down to accomplish or create anything; Faiers' gift was to make it all look so easy, so right and so perfect.

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"Ted Faiers: Flat Space, paintings and works on paper 1953-1956"

At David Lusk Gallery, 4540 Poplar, in Laurelwood, through Jan. 28. Call (901) 767-3800. There will be a reception Friday from 6 to 8 p.m.

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