Troubled toons - John Wesley, pop art

Art in America, Feb, 1993 by Ken Johnson

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

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

In Olive Oyl (1973), the naked body of Popeye's skinny, squeaky girl friend is stretched into a kind of arching bridge with four angry and naked baby Sweetpeas sitting on it. Untitled (Horses and Clouds), 1988, portrays the dark shadows of horses seen from below making one pattern against another of white clouds and blue sky, as though a herd of equines were flying overhead in formation. Jack Frost (1990) is a picture of the heads of two 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 though the cliches of popular culture had been dipped in the pool of the artist's unconscious and come out soaked with private meanings, associations and feelings. In his strangest combinations of images, he may seem a descendant of Max Ernst: consider Lust (1990), in which Donald Duck, with his sailor's hat weirdly distended and his eyes bugged wide, has five sexy female legs protruding from his bill as though 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 composed, and there's almost always an intricate interplay of image and frame, with depicted elements often spilling out of the pictorial space. Just as he perfects vernacular drawing and composition, he also refines color. He works with flat, unmodulated hues, coloring-book style, but he transforms the generic, high-keyed palette of the Sunday funnies, graying or bleaching his hues to create strange off-shades. Whistler-like, he restricts many canvases to just two or three muted colors, and plays with slight shifts of tint from one area to another, sometimes to quietly dissonant effect. He deploys local color - yellow hair here, a yellow lamp there - to bounce 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 see why Donald Judd has been one of his most ardent champions.(2) If Wesley is a wayward son of Pop, he is no less a child of 1960s-style abstraction.

But what makes his work especially compelling is the way form contributes in a revelatory way to content. 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 empty room at a modern couch with a dark, gridded picture window behind it. The painting is made all in shades of grayed blue except for some rose pink for the man's face and hand; the space between the man and the couch is a pale blue void. Formally, the picture sets up a witty dialogue between the lower left, in which the man and his chair are drawn in arabesque curves, and the upper right, in which the couch and windows are rigidly rectilinear. But there is also a mood of mystery and sadness. The ominous emptiness of the couch suggests that someone is missing; it makes the man seem more alone. The blank windows and the rectilinear geometry amplify the sense 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 some 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 verges on the abstract: take Hips (1984), a grid painting that consists entirely of female pelvis profiles arranged in rows, where Wesley puns ingeniously on the essential sensuality of decoration. More often, though, his imagery seems to invoke other-than-rational stages of consciousness - a kind of waking dream.