Troubled toons - John Wesley, pop art

Art in America, Feb, 1993 by Ken Johnson

Wesley's images with women are especially telling in this regard. Consider two examples from early in his career. The Aviator's Daughters (1963) is a picture of two pretty young women wearing white dresses, seen against a solid black background and framed by a painted border of silhouetted antique airplanes. Found in a 1960s Sears catalogue, the girls gaze out at you demurely yet seductively; the one to the left has her arm raised to point upward, a mysteriously significant gesture. There is something inviting about them in a more than sexual way. Like sirens or dryads they beckon you to enter their secret world. Rabbits (1968) is one of Wesley's most arrestingly strange images, and one in which he veers particularly close to the surreal. In this 50-inch-long picture, a nude woman lies on her back with her eyes peacefully closed, holding her legs up by the knees and giving birth to - rabbits. On the right side of the painting, six black rabbits are lined up in rows, while the head of the seventh is emerging from between the woman's thighs. If The Aviator's Daughters is a doorway into dream space, Rabbits is outright fantasy.

Wesley's preoccupation with the feminine continues to the present. A 1991 series of pictures, based on photographs from French Elle magazines, vintage ca. 1950, introduces a more explicit eroticism. Each painting is a radically cropped and extremely simplified image of a woman who seems to be in a state of languorous sexual arousal. In some paintings, only her face is framed; in others she is seen nude from the waist up, and in a few canvases, only body parts - hands, legs, buttocks - are in view. There is a hint of Pop irony here; the paintings could be read as parodic commentaries on cliches of erotic representations of women. But one of the remarkable things about the paintings is how genuinely erotic they are, despite their reductive cartoon vocabulary. Wesley generates a great deal of sexual suggestiveness by very economical means. And in so doing, he produces a felicitous convergence of content and form as the sensuality of depicted skin and body - enlarged and brought visually close - is reflected in abstract pink color fields, sinuous line and severely cropped framing that concentrates compositional as well as erotic energy.

Once again, Wesley's surrealist/symbolist fascination with woman at the edge of consciousness, close to fantasy and dreaming, is paramount. In fact, in some of these works Wesley seems to personify the imagination as feminine. Perhaps this is why his works are never aggressive, tuned in less to the major networks of dog-eat-dog vanguardism than to elusive signals of poetic receptivity. There is a significant distinction between Wesley and the artist he's most likely to be compared to, Roy Lichtenstein. Unlike Lichtenstein, whose highly cerebral preoccupation with style has produced a kind of accelerated linear development, phase following phase, Wesley has never approached the formal as an end in itself. Nor does he "advance." Rather, he keeps going back to old images, and while his style has become over the years more refined, more elegantly economical, it hasn't changed in any dramatic way since the early 1960s. Indeed, in the absence of specific information, it is often difficult to date his works, in part because he regularly makes paintings based on gouaches of 10 or 15 years earlier. Practically speaking, a painting like Olive Oyl looks as though it could as easily have been made in 1990 as 1973. Conversely, Lust (1990) is based on a gouache made in the late '60s. And the realm of fantasy that inspires him is itself timeless.