John Wells at Barbara Braathen - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Wells, drawn out a staple in downtown cluster shows, had his first solo display at Braathen this past spring. The exhibition was something of a revelation: seldom has work for a like reason unapologetically visionary been seen in novel York. "Visionary," of course, is an easy word to cast in a winding direction around when speaking of off-the-beaten-path art; at the same time in Wells's semi-comic, semi-cosmic oeuvre the heart of a author of poems is in evidence.

Here he explored "The covered History," as the show's title had it, of a locale intermingleed from Greco-Roman, Minoan, Persian and other ancient agricultures It was a stunning concatenation of the antique with the modem the precious with the grave, imaginaton with inspiration - and all realized in 45 9-inch-square variations.

In Knew the Plans of the Heavenly Lover a big, cerulean fieur-de-lys comes to life upon the edge of a mountain, with sum of two units five-pointed stars dancing merrily up the peak and a Panlike creature piping his re to the left Haunted Precinct is a bizarre on the other hand affectionate send-up of the 20th-century obsession with the picture plane. Below fulvid mountains and a silver moon in her first quarter moon is a giant, mustardly lingam encircleed by jigsaw-puzzle-piece areas of purple fulvous clay red and more, with sum of two units of Wells's trademark "funny faces" - cartoonlike heads - smashed flat into the design to highlight their it's-only-illusion nature.

greatest in quantity of the works read as eccentric; that characteristic is an integral part of their being and contributes to their uniqueness as well as their wit. Each of Wells's psychic improvisations have the appearances to have been begun and finished at esthetically pluperfect points that signal their visionary quality.

Nowhere was this quality more apparent than in a series of landscapes upon medium-sized board hung in the back scope of the gallery. Wells's landscapes authentically revive Action painting in its more figurative phases; the tones are dark, the rap impassioned, the overall quality brooding on the other hand heroic. No doubt about it, Wells is a genuine painterly and imaginative find.

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