At the Burnaby Art Gallery until July 11

A dreamlike atmosphere pervades the Burnaby Art Gallery’s retrospective of the work of George Fertig. An immense turquoise orb rises above a hallucinatory grey landscape. Tiny, yellow, fishlike clouds drift toward another celestial body, shaped like a giant egg. The base of a towering black cone glows red in the encompassing darkness.

Throughout this selection of large and small oil paintings, created between 1949 and 1982, metaphysical inquiry glows like the moon and the stars. Symbolic landscapes celebrate sexual union and spiritual aspiration; still-life compositions are unearthly still, forever arresting a state of alchemical transformation.

A self-taught artist, Fertig was born in rural Alberta in 1915 and died, impoverished and largely unrecognized, in Vancouver in 1983. Throughout his creative life, spent in this city, he struggled to realize a vision that was neither critically fashionable nor commercially viable. Powerfully influenced by Jungian psychology and its attendant beliefs in archetypes and the collective unconscious, Fertig eschewed the characteristically West Coast landscapes that served Jack Shadbolt’s semi-abstraction so well. And yet, like Shadbolt, he was preoccupied with images of procreation and sexual energy. Fertig’s vision, however, is far more benign and far less fraught than Shadbolt’s. Far less acclaimed, too.

Shadbolt’s name comes up, along with modernist West Coast artists such as Gordon Smith, Toni Onley, and Takao Tanabe, in the newly released book The Life and Art of George Fertig (Mother Tongue, $36.95), by Mona Fertig. (Copies are available in the gallery.) The older of George and Evelyn Fertig’s two daughters, Mona argues that her father was unjustly excluded from what she sees as a tight little club of modernists who dominated the interwoven realms of exhibition, teaching, and grant-giving in this region. George Fertig, she insists, never sold out—never relinquished his socialist ideals, never wavered in his commitment to his vocation and his highly distilled, symbolically charged, faithfully recurring imagery.

Art-historical movements such as postimpressionism, symbolism, and surrealism inform Fertig’s landscape art. In his still-life paintings, there’s a Giorgio Morandi–like dedication to a few simple forms, such as lemons, apples, bowls, and vases (although the treatment is quite different). In both genres, Fertig maintains a restricted palette, often consisting of acid yellow together with deep browns and blacks, or rich turquoise with dark or silvery greys. In both landscape and still-life compositions, Fertig consistently juxtaposes feminine and masculine principles. For instance, in Alchemical Conception in a Black Bowl, a tadpole-like form swims upward within a small crucible. In The Pink Moon, tumescent vegetation in a desert landscape rises toward a big pink oval hanging in the night sky. And in Untitled, a 1980 image of incandescent yellow fruit, the pointed end of a lemon nudges the perfect circle of an apple.

At his best, Fertig skillfully conveys a deep and meditative sense of the mystery at the core of existence. At his worst, his landscapes resemble nerdy sci-fi illustrations. Overall, his still lifes are the most consistently successful works on view—a perfect Jungian balance between the conscious and the unconscious, the corporeal and the spiritual, the image and the archetype.

Alchemical Conception in Black Bowl (1976).