Jane Filer is well-known to Triangle gallery-goers, who will have seen her work in many group shows and in numerous solo exhibitions at Tyndall Galleries and various nonprofit venues. Filer has for many years been developing a distinctive personal style. With the work of the last year, that style has really jelled, and while it's no less filled with odd things, these paintings have a coherence that I had not previously felt from the older ones. This is her best body of work so far. The paintings assert their own truth, and that truth makes perfect sense--even when it is a donkey-headed man with ears like tall buildings who is telling you the story, and you have no idea what he's talking about.
I've always thought that Filer's work had a Chagall-like quality. She creates worlds where things can happen with a dream-like logic, worlds where a mystical spirituality is to be expected. She loves to play with changes of scale, not just within the picture, but within individual figures, and has now become so adept at this that it no longer seems awkward, but increases the fantastic effect. This new body of work also seems to have been inspired by the great color patchworks and wonderful little drawings of Paul Klee, and these Klee-like structures add considerably to the substantiality of Filer's paintings.
Her colors and her surfaces have developed a great deal, and are rich and complex in this new work. In some cases she collages in pieces of fabric for pattern or texture, but mostly our visual satisfaction arises from the good qualities of her painting. She combines wet and dry, smooth and scratchy textures. She both lays the paint on with a knife and brushes it; she builds up layers, then scrapes and draws back into them. Her palette is very warm--lots of golden yellows, oranges and reds--and this is part of what makes her bizarre worlds seem like places we'd want to go.
These worlds are full of psychic space, yet have almost no perspectival depth. Everything is flat, and the picture spaces are very shallow. They are filled with birds, fish and strange animals, and with monumental figures that may exhibit some of the traits of buildings around them. Architecture appears in all of Filer's paintings, and there is generally some kind of conveyance--a car, a boat, a spaceship. There are many things from current life, yet her pictures seem completely outside of time. Who knows what they mean? Probably not even the artist. But you don't have to know. You just have to feel.
April 25, 2001 Kate Dobbs Ariail
