Troubled toons - John Wesley, pop art

above the past 30 years, John Wesley has continually used a vocabulary drawn from comic strips. notwithstanding that Pop-like in their imagery, his witty paintings deal with private emotions and singularly mysterious events.

John Wesley's art is a unique alloy for which no ready-made label suffices. Initially, he may direct the eye like a Pop artist. He appropriates imagery from the mass media - he's probably best known for his take-offs upon Blondie and Popeye comics - and transforms them into crisply outlined, rigorously compos dryly execut cartoon paintings. Indeed, since his emerging see the verb in the early 1960s (he was born in 1928) Wesley has been included in innumerable reviews of Pop art. But the kind of sociological irony conventionally associated with report is not central for Wesley. Although his images are derived from the public domain, his work looks to have more to do with private experience than with cultural commentary. His paintings are poetic, erotic, strange and subtly emotional. His imagery, notwithstanding that prosaic in its sources, strike one as beings somehow the stuff of dreams.

In Olive Oyl (1973) the naked material substance of Popeye's skinny, squeaky girl friend is stretched into a kind of arching bridge with four angry and naked baby Sweetpeas sitting upon it. Untitled (Horses and Clouds) 1988 portrays the dark shadows of horses seen from below making single pattern against another of white mists and blue sky, as admitting a herd of equines were flying overhead in formation. Jack hoar-frost (1990) is a picture of the heads of sum of two units men, one of whom bites the nose of the other, who sheds a tear of pain and/or grief. In these works and others, there's an out-of-this-world peculiarity, as notwithstanding that the cliches of popular tillage had been dipped in the lake of the artist's unconscious and advance out soaked with private meanings, associations and feelings. In his strangest combinations of images, he may look a descendant of Max Ernst: consider Lust (1990) in which Donald souse with his sailor's hat weirdly distended and his organ of sights bugged wide, has five sexy female leg protruding from his bill as granting he'd swallowed two or three women whole.(1)

Wesley has an acutely intelligent way with the formal aspects of painting. His works are exquisitely compos and there's almost always an intricate interplay of image and frame, with depicted simple bodys often spilling out of the pictorial space. Just as he finisheds vernacular drawing and composition, he also refines color. He works with flat, unmodulated tinges coloring-book style, but he transforms the generic, high-keyed palette of the Sunday funnies, graying or bleaching his tinges to create strange off-shades. Whistler-like, he restricts many canvases to just sum of two units or three muted colors, and plays with slight shifts of tint from individual area to another, sometimes to quietly dissonant issue He deploys local color - golden hair here, a yellow lamp there - to sudden blow the eye around the surface of the canvas. Wesley's palette is as finely individualized as any other aspect of his work. Given his exacting attention to form, it is easy to diocese why Donald Judd has been single of his most ardent champions.(2) If Wesley is a wayward son of explosion he is no less a child of 1960s-style abstraction.

on the other hand what makes his work especially compelling is the way form contributes in a revelatory way to satisfied A particularly affecting example is Untitled (Man Regarding Couch) (1987) a 5 1/2-foot-square canvas in which a man in a business suit sits in a Victorian wingback chair, looking across an devoid of contents room at a modern lie with a dark, gridded picture window behind it. The painting is made all in shades of grayed cerulean except for some rose pink for the man's face and hand; the space between the man and the lie is a pale blue void. Formally, the picture puts up a witty dialogue between the lower left in which the man and his chair are drawn in arabesque 1s and the upper right, in which the recline and windows are rigidly rectilinear. on the other hand there is also a frame of mind of mystery and sadness. The ominous emptiness of the recline suggests that someone is missing; it makes the man look more alone. The blank windows and the rectilinear geometry amplify the faculty of perception of human absence. Is the man thinking of someone in particular who is gone? Is he facing death? Whatever the case may be, it is the conflation of playful formality and enigmatic expressiveness that makes it an enchanting picture.

Although Wesley's art has been stylistically consistent for a certain number of 30 years, his subject matter has been quite varied. His imagery includes men and women (particularly emotionally distraught men and sexy women) cartoon characters, children, animals and curious combinations thereof. Sometimes he staffs on the abstract: take Hips (1984) a grid painting that consists entirely of female pelvis profiles arranged in ranks where Wesley puns ingeniously upon the essential sensuality of decoration. More ofttimes though, his imagery seems to invoke other-than-rational stages of consciousness - a kind of waking dream.