
Installation view of “Old Man and His Mountains: The Trail of Tails, Trials, and Triumphs,” at Salt Lake Community College’s South City Campus, with Robert Füerer’s “Bound By Screens” on the right. Image by Steve Coray.
One of the more charming and inspiring stories to be told in paint recently has only a couple of weeks remaining at the South City Campus of Salt Lake Community College. Old Man and His Mountains: The Trail of Tails, Trials, and Triumphs is the work of Robert Füerer, who has returned to Utah with the latest chapter of his international family saga. The “Old Man” is his father, whose life, symbolized as a walking tour, takes viewers on a journey through many of the Füerer family’s encounters and experiences..
A hike is generally a good way of meeting others, and the history of painting is full of examples of the subject. One of the best-known is Courbet’s “The Meeting, or Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet.” While Füerer doesn’t mention it, this depiction of contrast between robust country folk and over-refined city dwellers looks like it influenced “Untethered,” in which the painter’s father is seen burdened with what at first looks to be a massive backpack, but which on further examination turns out to be a rabbit-powered, portable clinic that provides him with the means for staying alive in the late stages of lung cancer. The contrast between his active life, as seen in youthful scenes, such as “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and what it takes to enable him to retain his peripatetic lifestyle is ironically captured in a title that explains how the dying man is “untethered” from his sickbed.

Robert Füerer, “Untethered”
The presence of rabbits acting as companions and sentinels will continue to occur in many of the following scenes. Füerer doesn’t explain whether he adopted these broadly symbolic animals during his long stay in Asia, but just as the Alps remind him of the mountains of Utah, so walking with his father, whether along Orem’s Palisade Drive in “Her Mountain, Our Journey,” or elsewhere in Taiwan, reminds the two men of their late mother and wife. While Füerer often describes such scenes as “like a dream,” the much-loved silhouette of Mt. Timpanogos lends a sense of reality to the two survivors shared memories of her.
Memory, of course, is one of the major preoccupations of contemporary art. For some artists, the cerebral mechanisms of retaining and recollecting the past have become technical concerns in themselves, but for Füerer, memory gives rise to story-telling. Memory as an experience of consciousness can be captured in simple images, but telling a story requires something more. Contemplating the series here permits identifying some of the ways memories are augmented and elaborated into stories.
As a painter, Füerer’s style might be described as “loose,” but perhaps “unpretentious” would be more accurate. These scenes are as approachable as the man who painted them, and where a series of so many large and complex works could be daunting, in fact they are engaging and even entertaining. That they tell a tale of his extended family, including some unhappy facts as surely befall every such group, but do so in a visual language that has become familiar to his audience, makes some of their less conventional features accessible in turn. And where the mechanisms of memory tend to be generic, the specificity of these memories marks them as parts of stories.
One image in particular, “Journey Beyond Peaks,” is concisely credited to one of the foremost Romantics: Caspar David Friedrich, and his “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.” Füerer has lifted its overall composition, but redrawn details ranging from the original’s anonymous mountain, which here becomes the most recognizable of the Alps, the Matterhorn, to the characteristic attire worn by his father. Also characteristic of Füerer is the way the scene spreads off the edges of the canvas to cover the frame, as well. It’s tempting to credit this as a comment on the way memorable art works diffuse into the viewer’s consciousness and influence the lives they inhabit, but Füerer lends it a more candid spin. According to his account, someone urged him to put his works in gilt frames in order to make them more collectable, but he found the contrast between his contemplative subjects and color schemes and the visually dominant frames threatened to crush the life out of the former, and this was his way of fixing the problem without wasting the expensive frames he had bought. However, as is so often the case when artists attempt to explain their work, his story does nothing to negate or discredit the subconscious impact of the way he ended up painting the frames.
- Robert Füerer, “Journey Beyond Peaks”
- Robert Füerer, “To The Place He Loved Most”
Another specific detail, though it does have a more generic background, is the person who celebrates his automotive history by saving his license plates over years. We may, from time to time, see them displayed on the back of a shed or side of a barn. In “To the Place He Loved Most,” Füerer shows us his father, known as “Vehicle Vince” for his love of Volkswagens, driving the family to an affordable vacation in the Uinta National Forest. While the focus of this work is the artist’s presence in the car’s back seat, where he appears as a dark rabbit—a shade of adolescent alienation—the most telling part for the viewer is likely to be its having been painted on an assortment of the father’s expired license plates.
Despite one’s wish to find it, it turns out there is no one painting that exemplifies the use of rabbits across the spectrum of these works. In one, rabbits in hutches symbolize father Vince’s satisfaction at having his beloved wife and children in his life. In another, they swim out to accompany the artist’s parents as his mother rows his father’s body and navigates “the waters of loss and transition.” At key moments, rabbits are often present without a specific role, other than perhaps the promise of their continuing presence. That they are never just rabbits may be best shown in “Father Joins the Clouds,” which celebrates (if that isn’t too odd a turn of speech) the fact that the fathers of both Robert and his wife, Erin, died of lung cancer. The two men bookend the panel and the path along which Robert and Erin travel together in life as rabbits. One father is an angel, the other transmogrifies from a rabbit to a spiritual state, no doubt to join his cloud-like companions in the sky. All this take place in a field of irises inspired by Van Gogh.

Robert Füerer, “Father Joins the Clouds”
If this seems like a lot for a mere painting to contain, it’s not more than several other works hold. Being pictures, each story they tell could fill a chapter in a biography, along with accounts of how the artist came to travel and live in so many places, study the local philosophies, and learn to speak both verbal and visual languages in uniquely personal ways. In the end, Füerer’s plea for a genuine connection to his daughter in an age where we are separated by the devices that were supposed to connect us: “Bound By Screens,” may best make the point that it is art alone that can save us, not only from our technology, but every other promise of progress.

My Old Man and His Mountains: The Trail of Tails, Trials, and Triumphs, Center for Arts And Media, Edna Runswick Taylor Foyer, Salt Lake Community, through Feb. 7
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
Very Nice to Hear from you Dear John (the Baptiste). I am still thinking of our inspiring collaboration in the nineties. Wolfgang
Www. Glasshouse.de
Wolfgang, it’s so wonderful to hear from you. I’m so happy! I looked up your wonderful magazine online and it seems you have done exceedingly well with it. For those who may be puzzled by all this, Dr Wolfgang Schmölders is the editor and publisher of Glasshouse – the International Magazine of Studio Glass, a splendid German periodical that is essential reading for those interested in the International Glass movement. Dr. Schmölders, who dubbed me John the Baptist for what were obvious reasons, valiantly supported my writing at a time when glass art was too valuable for it to seem necessary to publicize it. We need more people with his vision in the arts if the impact of money isn’t to distort everything.