{"id":89774,"date":"2025-01-21T05:47:23","date_gmt":"2025-01-21T12:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=89774"},"modified":"2025-03-17T15:03:52","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T22:03:52","slug":"mountains-and-rabbits-guide-robert-fuerers-reflections-on-memory-and-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/mountains-and-rabbits-guide-robert-fuerers-reflections-on-memory-and-family\/","title":{"rendered":"Mountains and Rabbits Guide Robert F\u00fcerer\u2019s Reflections on Memory and Family"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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 F\u00fcerer’s \u201cBound By Screens” on the right. Image by Steve Coray.<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/i> is the work of Robert F\u00fcerer<\/a>, who has returned to Utah with the latest chapter of his international family saga. The \u201cOld Man\u201d is his father, whose life, symbolized as a walking tour, takes viewers on a journey through many of the F\u00fcerer family\u2019s encounters and experiences..<\/h4>\n

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\u2019s \u201cThe Meeting, or Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet.\u201d<\/a> While F\u00fcerer doesn\u2019t mention it, this depiction of contrast between robust country folk and over-refined city dwellers looks like it influenced \u201cUntethered,\u201d in which the painter\u2019s 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 \u201cYou\u2019ll Never Walk Alone,\u201d 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 \u201cuntethered\u201d from his sickbed.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n
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Robert F\u00fcerer, “Untethered”<\/p><\/div>\n

The presence of rabbits acting as companions and sentinels will continue to occur in many of the following scenes. F\u00fcerer doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s Palisade Drive in \u201cHer Mountain, Our Journey,\u201d or elsewhere in Taiwan, reminds the two men of their late mother and wife. While F\u00fcerer often describes such scenes as \u201clike a dream,” the much-loved silhouette of Mt. Timpanogos lends a sense of reality to the two\u00a0 <\/span>survivors shared memories of her.<\/h4>\n

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 F\u00fcerer, 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.<\/h4>\n

As a painter, F\u00fcerer’s style might be described as \u201cloose,\u201d but perhaps \u201cunpretentious\u201d 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.<\/h4>\n

One image in particular, \u201cJourney Beyond Peaks,\u201d is concisely credited to one of the foremost Romantics: Caspar David Friedrich, and his \u201cWanderer Above the Sea of Fog.\u201d F\u00fcerer has lifted its overall composition, but redrawn details ranging from the original\u2019s anonymous mountain, which here becomes the most recognizable of the Alps, the Matterhorn, to the characteristic attire worn by his father. Also characteristic of F\u00fcerer is the way the scene spreads off the edges of the canvas to cover the frame, as well. It\u2019s tempting to credit this as a comment on the way memorable art works diffuse into the viewer\u2019s consciousness and influence the lives they inhabit, but F\u00fcerer 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.<\/h4>\n