{"id":96445,"date":"2025-09-25T01:17:36","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T08:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=96445"},"modified":"2025-10-07T09:49:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T16:49:26","slug":"fidalis-buehlers-me-myths-walk-the-line-between-dream-and-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/fidalis-buehlers-me-myths-walk-the-line-between-dream-and-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Fidalis Buehler\u2019s Me-Myths Walk the Line Between Dream and Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Installation view of Fidalis Buehler: Stories from the Bone Box at Modern West Fine Art. Courtesy of Modern West.<\/p><\/div>\n

Fidalis Buehler\u2019s paintings often appear deceptively simple: flat figures, awkward hands, distorted proportions and faces obscured by hoods or masks. He seems to be working in code, charging ordinary objects like couches, sneakers, or an inflatable swimming pool with a private mythology of stories half-remembered and half-inherited. Born in Wisconsin to a Swiss-American father and a Micronesian mother, Buehler grew up moving between the Midwest and the Pacific Islands (see our profile here<\/a>). That mixture of places and traditions has left him, by his own account, always \u201con the periphery of cultures,\u201d watching but never fully belonging. His art mines this in-betweenness, producing what he calls \u201cme-myths\u201d\u2014visual stories that splice together folklore, religious symbolism, and family memory.<\/h4>\n

When Buehler first appeared in these pages in 2013<\/a>, grouped with Brian Kershisnik and Andrew Ballstaedt, Kev Nemelka tagged the trio with the label \u201cfaux-na\u00efve\u201d\u2014trained artists who paint in a deliberately childlike register, bypassing polish complication in favor of immediacy and play, their works flirting with kitsch in search for bedrock truth. It’s an artistic lineage that runs through both Paul Klee and Philip Guston (though these BYU grads avoid\u00a0 the dread and claustrophobia of the latter\u2014not to mention the cigarettes, alcohol and Klansmen). Kershisnik, also showing this month in Salt Lake City, applies his “naif” method to legible scenes of family, angels, and dogs rendered with warm allegorical clarity. Buehler, in contrast, uses the same directness to keep things unsettled, suggestive but not distinct.<\/h4>\n

In Stories from the Bone Box<\/em>, his new solo exhibition at Modern West, Buehler\u2019s canvases still carry the awkward anatomy and flattened perspective that once drew comparisons to folk art and children\u2019s drawings. They are populated with what have become his recurring figures, symbols, and masks\u2014images that feel both intimate and inscrutable. Buehler has explained some of the personal references behind his works, turning them into a kind of literary illustration, but left to themselves\u2014feral, roaming in the wild\u2014his paintings become mysterious totems, speaking in a language you can hear but not quite translate.<\/h4>\n