Fidalis Buehler, ‘Popcorn King,’ 2021, oil on panel, 60 x 48 in.

It’s well known that sensations like flavors, odors, and sights tend to be unpleasant on first encounter—a mechanism that protects individuals from unknown dangers—but that with further experience they may come to seem neutral, even positively delightful. Captured in a single image, the phenomenon might take the form of a monster that, on further contemplation, turns out to be benign. It might look like “Popcorn King,” an ominous figure with dark mien, a spiky head and black hands, whose speech cannot always be readily deciphered, and whose surroundings include a perplexing code: OXX, OXO, and so forth. To the children of this figure of menace, though, he’s just Dad, source of love and kisses, whose family ritual includes TV-watching fueled by popcorn, the images of which he holds in his hands having been drawn by those very children. So it is in real life: nothing is guaranteed to be what it appears to be, and we’re all like so many explorers finding our way through it

Friday the 13th isn’t usually considered an auspicious date, but that day in September was chosen by Modern West for the opening of In Dialogue, an exhibition that foregrounds the unique working relationship of two artists: one an influential teacher; the other, not that long ago, a student: two ambitious figures whose studio encounter grew into an example of an essential connection most artists rely on—friendships with other artists.

“Dialogue” is an art-world metaphor, used most often around architecture to describe the way two buildings that may face each other, or stand side-by-side, each stimulate viewers to see the other differently than either would appear alone. What Shalee Cooper and her collaborators have done is hang 40 paintings by Fidalis Buehler, BYU professor of studio art, and Mitch Mantle, studio art professor at Glendale Community College in Arizona, in the sort of seemingly loose but actually carefully balanced array that has become Cooper’s signature curatory practice. This includes one wall on which almost 20 works are hung the way families might display photographs of their ancestors and themselves through their histories. It’s an approach that brings out a powerful feeling for how much two superficially very different painters have in common.

Mitch Mantle, left, and Shalee Cooper, right, flank Mantle’s work “Orange-Red Man” during a discussion of the exhibition “In Dialogue” at Modern West in Salt Lake City. Image by Geoff Wichert.

On that Friday, the two artists took turns explaining what they have discovered they hold in common, engagingly finishing each other’s sentences and communicating to their audience a sense of the joy they create by this conversation. Mantle explained that they no longer show each other their work in progress—“‘Cause we’re so easily influenced,” Buehler interjected—and in fact they agreed that they mostly see each other’s art at times like this, when they encounter it on a gallery wall. But they do converse, not too surprisingly about each other’s lives and life-events, their families, especially their two sons, and the shared experience of mid-career professionals whose lives follow similar paths.

From time to time they also discuss recent developments in their art-making processes as those continue to evolve in the years since they worked closely together. One might report painting with his non-dominant hand to see what emerges. Both routinely use experiences as prompts, which sounds likely enough but in fact constitutes a radical departure from most of art’s history, when subjects were often commissioned or lifted from prevailing sources. Warmed-over concepts, like allegories or cultural metaphors, are unlikely to appear here. Both denied being likely to produce or copy images, even their own, the way Artificial Intelligence is said to do, but which clashes with a lifetime of free, spontaneous painting. Pointing to his large “2-Legged Wanderer Meets 3-Legged Wanderer”—like all his figures, it invokes potential narrative while not doing anything so predictable as copying conventional characters—Buehler remarked that if prompted to do it over, he might well decide to change the number of their legs.

Fidalis Buehler, “2-Legged Wanderer Meets 3-Legged Wanderer,’ 2024, mixed media, 48 x 60 in.

Mitch Mantle, ‘Setting the Table 5,’ 2021, intaglio and monotype, 29 x 36.5 in.

Instead of trying to create copies real enough to be confused with life, their effort goes into using shapes and colors to call attention to the unprecedented, even miraculous-seeming experiences that make up their lives. Mantle’s “Setting the Table” exemplifies how a helicopter view and lack of perspective-drafting can make the most mundane, repeated event seem worth attention. Buehler’s conically-draped figures recall the school uniforms that children are often made to wear, in that they allow seeing through misleading differences—what Indian philosophers calls “Maya” or illusion—to the “attributeless Absolute” that a naive, unprejudiced person might find. Human behavior is challenging enough without all the would-be magic and disguise we attempt to hide behind.

Perhaps the most revealing concept that Mantle and Buehler have shared, first with each other and now with us, is the “Phantom Limb.” The reference, of course, is to the neural network’s memory of a lost body part that interferes with the remaining body’s accurate self-perception: a lost limb that the limbic system goes on perceiving as if it were still present. What the painters mean to identify, however, is the rising into consciousness of a recognition that in one present, perhaps recalled memory or new perception, is the return of another, previous stimulus or experience. One child might remind the artist of another, or of himself when he was younger. A benign social event might exhume a lost memory of something malign in the past, or vice versa. The fact remains that images invoke each other, that art always stands as metaphor between reality and the image, and what makes it so personal and individual is that no two of us has the same memories, or ways of associating to them.

Both artists’ works have been described using that term, “naive,” which in this case refers to a deliberate choice to do without the sophisticated reproduction of visual appearances that it took five centuries for Western painters to master. What that leaves to the audience is the sheer pleasure of closely studying what’s here, rather than what’s not, and discovering the tremendous sophistication with which they invent new ways to combine shapes and colors that replace those tired, over-familiar duplications that led late 20th-century wits to announce that painting was dead. It’s not, and a moment spent comparing the look of Mitch Mantle with the “Orange-Red Man,” in front of which he, Fidalis Buehler and Shalee Cooper sat during their discussion at the opening, may well prove the beginning of a long and most rewarding conversation with what these three are in the midst of achieving.

Installation view of “In Dialogue” at Modern West Fine Art. Image by Geoff Wichert.

In Dialogue: Fidalis Buehler/Mitch Mantle, Modern West Fine Art, Salt Lake City, through Nov. 1

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.