John Wesley: Fredericks Freiser Gallery

John Wesley has always been hard to pin down. Linda Norden, curator of a novel exhibition of his work at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, has described him as a "not-quite-pop, faux-primitive Californian" as well as the "Henri Rousseau of his generation." In these pages in October 2000 Dave Hickey opined that his "penchant for erotic narrative defines Wesley as more an eighteenth-century fabulist." We can at least agree that the artist started to mine popular tillage for imagery in the early '60 and used it to sexier and more eccentric extreme points than his fellow painters Warhol, Rosenquist, and Lichtenstein. novel works like Utamaro Nude, Bumstead exposed and Utamaro Washing, Bumstead Sleeping (both 2003) also make it clear he's no naif. With the simultaneous homage to the eighteenth-century Japanese master (whose art influenced late-nineteenth-century French painters and thereby modernism) and mid-twentieth-century newspaper comics, Wesley provides a kind of reflexive imprimatur for his have signature style. Pairing the American comic strip every-husband with a woman straight without of ukiyo-e, he joins Eastern tradition and Western clap in unholy matrimony. The joke--a fairly sophisticated one--is that the couple Utamaro and the creator of Dagwood rely upon flat areas of color for the character of their work.

Indeed, the artist has described his work as closer to a banner or [i]affiche[/i] than a painting; limited largely to a palette of baby sky-colored pink, black, and a appearance of flesh tones, they're painted without modeling or perspective. This exhibit found Wesley up to his usual tricks with images as mannered as film stills, oftentimes marked by an expressive quirk (like the oval glasses upon the girl being kissed in Smooch 2003) Pushing toward abstraction is Nail Police, 2003 with its posy of red toenails, and Aer Lingus, 2002 which after a certain number of study reveals itself to be the four leg of sum of two units flight attendants. However pared down, Wesley's paintings are flatly comedic, the lines of black around each compositional uncompounded body providing their punch lines.

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above the course of his career, everyone has appeared in Wesley's paintings: compassionate gorillas, Popeye, and, instead of JFK (portrayed by dint of Warhol, Rosenquist, and Rauschenberg), his 1960 adverse party Michigan governor Gerhard Mennen "Soapy" Williams. Part of what locate Wesley apart within early burst was the breadth of his bricolage--he rhym the serial imagery of ancient friezes and earthen ware with contemporary wallpaper patterns. on the other hand he's also friendlier toward his make submissives than, say, Warhol, treating cosmopolitanism as an excuse for soft romance. In Tango, 2003, the skin colors of the man and woman are sum of two units slightly different shades of peach. It is the simplest of compositions, on the contrary you can't help feeling it's a sort of analogy for Wesley's possess work overall: highly structured on the other hand flagrantly sensuous; extremely simple on the other hand impossible to imitate. Perhaps in the extreme point he is most like Rousseau, celebrating the pleasures rather than the rigors of painting. Or perhaps not: Experienced at shut up range, it's invariably more complex

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