Tom Fairs: Transformations

My interest is primarily in things seen: landscape, interiors, still life where, in the light of the imagination, the common-place may be transformed into the extraordinary. The ever-present transforming principle moves me. I have no theories, no special techniques and no information to communicate. I try to achieve a brief glimpse of the implicit order that lies beneath what we perceive as reality.

– Tom Fairs

Pale Horse is delighted to present an exhibition of works on paper by British artist Tom Fairs (1925–2007). This marks the first solo exhibition of Fairs’ work in London in almost twenty years, and is the first exhibition in the city dedicated to his works on paper. Following his retirement as a much-admired senior lecturer at the Central School of Art and Design, Fairs devoted the last decades of his life to the practice of drawing outdoors each day. With unwavering commitment he turned his attention to the mercurial nature of the landscape, notably his North London surroundings, Transformations brings together a selection of pastels and pencil drawings created during this period. Though varied in medium and effect, these works cumulatively express Fairs’ intuitive capacity to draw out the inner qualities within a landscape. 

Tightly cropped and modestly-scaled, the drawings and pastels reveal Fairs’ sustained exploration into the mutable relationship between perception and form. Despite their small scale, each work seemingly contains the vast infinitude of the landscape: the meteorological fluctuations, atmospheric shifts and fleeting changes in light as and when they occurred. “The ever-present transforming principle moves me”, wrote Fairs in his only extant statement, succinctly expressing his belief in perpetual transformation as a condition of reality. For Fairs, perception was not a passive act; both the landscape and the act of looking remain in continual flux. This abiding principle aligned him conceptually with French artist Cézanne, an interview with whom Fairs had printed and pinned to his studio wall. Both artists sought, with remarkable discipline, to capture with the hand what the eye experiences: that fragile intersection where sensation begins to cohere into form. 

Armed with the humblest of means, pencil and paper, Fairs skillfully navigated the enigmatic rhythms inherent in nature, translating these ordered structures with a dramatic fluidity on the page. Charged pen strokes made up of frenetic scribbles, delicate sinuous lines and staccato dashes form Fairs’ repertoire of mark-making. Employed with dexterous sensitivity, Fairs utilised his unbounded vocabulary of marks to compose the endless cacophony of sounds and flickering sights that built up his chosen London landscape. Executed with a deftness of touch and absolute economy, these images hover upon the surface of the paper, their relative fragility evocative of memory and the inextricable subjectivity of the gaze. Disregarding the limitations of medium and surface, Fairs possessed an ability to place a primacy on light within his works. Arguably his previous training in stained glass provided him with an intrinsic understanding of treating light as subject, and whilst a deep love of London is at the core of his work, his approach to light is unmistakably French. It is in his treatment of light, especially in the pastels, that we witness his kinship with his artistic hero, Pierre Bonnard. 

Always working outside, and most often taking Hampstead Heath as his starting point, Fairs ‘framed’ his works on paper with a hand-drawn pencil-line border. This seemingly futile gesture not only announces the work’s completion and finished state, but equally is suggestive of Fairs’ own window frame, subtly imbuing a lifelike quality to the work despite their abstracted nature. Standing before the work the viewer is confronted with a multitude of vast disparities. Whilst the drawings and pastels contain the confluence of all the artists he admired, all the approaches to landscape and light that preceded him, they are at the same time wholly singular. Fairs is never anything other than entirely himself. Each small drawing somehow simultaneously contains a history of mark-making and the history of place, yet remains vitally alive in the purest sense. Above all, despite their sense of urgency and the apparent dynamic rapidity and spontaneity of their rendering, their ultimate impression is lasting.

Tom Fairs (1925, London, England–2007, London, England) lived and worked in London. Leaving school at fifteen, Fairs went on to study at Hornsey College of Art, subsequently completing his training at the Royal College of Art, where he specialised in stained glass, later receiving several public glass commissions. He spent much of his life teaching and was a senior lecturer at the Central School of Art and Design for over thirty years. Despite his hermetic existence and relative indifference to the art world, Fairs has posthumously received acclaim internationally with numerous solo exhibitions in New York at Van Doren Waxter (2017, 2019, 2023) and Kerry Schuss (2011, 2012, 2015) and in the UK at The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2012). Fairs has also been included in a number of group exhibitions, such as Drawn Together Again (2019) at Flag Art Foundation, New York; Gaze (2018) at Van Doren Waxter, New York; and Outside (2016) at Karma, Amagansett, NY, curated by Matthew Higgs. Several glowing reviews and articles on the artist have been published in The New York Times (Ken Johnson, Roberta Smith, Will Heinrich), Artforum (Matthew Higgs, Barry Schwabsky) and New York Magazine (Jerry Saltz), amongst others.

Despite their significance to Fairs’ practice, the works on paper were never shown in Fairs’ lifetime, and whilst their overwhelmingly positive reception by the New York art world is a happy postscript to Fair's relative obscurity, the artist was a lifelong Londoner and Pale Horse is delighted to be bringing his work back to the city.

Pale Horse would like to express its sincere gratitude and heartfelt thanks to Bobbie Oliver and Dorsey Waxter for their continued support and generosity throughout this project. Their unwavering commitment and dedication to the work of Tom Fairs is the sole reason that this exhibition has been made possible.