John Wilde at Schmidt Bingham - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Having weathered Ab Ex burst Minimalism and the 1980s, John Wilde continues to refine his precisely returned oils and silverpoints. One of the predominant technicians of the style known as Magic Realism, Wilde is also perhaps the greatest in quantity interesting of the group of Midwestern fantasists of the '40 which includes Gertrude Abercrombie, Karl Priebe and Julia Thecla. With a virtuosic perversity, Wilde carry throughs "studies" for his oils in silverpoint, a medium which allows for no erasures. The silverpoints accentuate the delicacy of Wilde's drawing; in them, the solid stops of vibrant color in his thinly painted oils abandon to the intricacy of his line.

These new works are some of his greatest in quantity dazzling, and include accomplished passages borrowed from Italian Renaissance masters. September border (1992-93) is the culmination of a series of vegetable still lifes drawn in the crisp, gnarly manner of Carlo Crivelli. In this work a female exposed with a deathly pallor contemplates an animal brain-pan as she stretches out behind an array of beautifully colored vegetables. in Walking Man & 2 Naked Ladies (1992) Wilde pay backs a townscape out of Piero della Francesca in sharp perspective. With a Magritte-like insouciance, he embellishes it with sum of two units nudes who float serenely across the painting's foreground.

With his admitted penchant for depicting "fruits and naked ladies (and of advanced age houses and dead fish and birds and meadow mice)," Wilde is clearly on the outside of the mainstream of "serious" art - world regards Yet his whimsy is turfed by a cranky, often violent trustiness which is psychologically resonant. Working against the grain for the past 50 years, Wilde has no deal with complacency. On one of the silverpoints he writes, "Anyone not in torment in the true depth of anxiety in our age is an oaf or a blockhead."

Given today's socially therapeutic art world, Wilde is correct to have feeling that his own approach is beleaguered. In by what mode Far Does One Fall, a hermaphroditic warrior wearing alone geometrically patterned tights fights not upon an onslaught of serpents and bug that threaten to push him/her into an apocalyptic abyss. Wilde himself has courageously held upon to his exquisitely quirky esthetic without the succor of a neat and tidy art-historical category. however like fellow iconoclasts Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Jared French he has conjur up a certain quantity of of this century's most sensuous and loaded imagery.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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