source: frieze

When John Wesley makes paintings of women, which he does very often, he makes paintings about men. Against powder-blue backgrounds, he floods their lithe bodies with a flat shade of pale pink, except for a hotter tone used for lips, nails and nipples. These are pictures of heterosexual male desire. When men appear, they tend to be woefully disproportioned and eccentrically dressed. His women, by contrast, are the sylphs of an imagination fired by the dreamy perfection of women in magazines and dampened by the comic pathos of real-life encounters.

This exhibition – Wesley’s first at David Kordansky Gallery – contained few of the octogenarian artist’s trademark animals and no Bumstead or Utamaro, the most familiar of his cartoon protagonists. Instead, it focused on paintings of men with women, and on Wesley’s rarely shown sculptures from the mid-1960s and ’70s.

The exhibition’s no-nonsense title, ‘Objects and Paintings’, is disingenuous: Wesley, it becomes clear, has long strived to confuse the distinction between the two. Bikini (1979) is cut, just as a wearable garment would be, from fabric (in this case, canvas), but it also serves as a flat pictorial space for a seascape with puffy white clouds. Broadly speaking, sculptures fall into two categories: decorated found objects such as Bird Lovers (1973), a painted motorcycle helmet; and sculptures like Pillow (1975) and Ill Fitting Bikini Top (c. 1975), three-dimensional abstractions of common items, made from painted canvas stretched on wood.

Wesley delights in orchestrating meetings: between men and women, but also between animals and people, incongruous objects and uncomprehending languages. (Remember that Bumstead and Utamaro derive, respectively, from Chic Young’s comic strip ‘Blondie’ and from the 18th-century woodblock prints of Kitagawa Utamaro. No wonder it never worked out.) In Bird Lovers, nude women curl their bodies into balls while a bird flaps into the air above them. It’s an odd way to decorate a motorcycle helmet, but maybe it makes a certain sense – emblems of protection, freedom and eroticism swirling around the head of the rider.

Other meetings are equally unexpected. Nutcracker (1973) is fixed to a dish onto which the artist has painted a fat pink frog. Notwithstanding the testicular associations summoned by the title, the proximity of the operational nutcracker to the image of soft amphibian flesh is physically discomfiting. A salve to this sensation, however, is Wesley’s cool palette and streamlined graphic style; nothing really terrible could happen in such a sunny, saccharine world. Could it?

It is surprising to note that, despite this sense of brightness, the light in these paintings does not come from the sun, nor does it cast shadows. In Wesley’s world, there is no distinction between indoors and out, day and night. Which is ironic, because much of his subject matter arises from these contrasting modes of behaviour: those things that happen indoors, after dark (all of these paintings are of undressed couples, at least two of whom are in bed) and the moments when the seams of discretion or desire burst open, inconveniently, in broad daylight. The sculpture Ill Fitting Bikini Top, for instance, represents the latter phenomenon in abstracted, geometric form – blue rectangles around a pink box with, at one corner, an immodestly exposed nipple. As with the rectilinear white Pillow, it’s an affectionate jibe at Minimalism (Wesley’s first wife was Jo Baer and he was friends with Dan Flavin and Donald Judd), but it is also a rather literal joke about the objectification of a female body.

Wesley has never been afraid of taboos. Picnic Basket (1965), for instance, is a wooden box adorned with a repeating image of a grinning man, reportedly based on the Congolese politician Moïse Tshombe; the open lid reveals, painted inside, the breasts and blonde pubic hair of a white woman. Who knows what Wesley was thinking when he decided to paint that. Like certain other male artists of his generation – Tom Wesselmann, William Copley and Peter Saul spring to mind – Wesley presses at the limits of what might be considered crass or misogynistic in order to show how those qualities are ingrained into popular culture, all the while never claiming to be immune to the weaknesses of the flesh himself. That’s partly the nature of Pop, the movement with which Wesley is sometimes aligned, but also to do with the legacy of Surrealism, which encouraged its adherents to follow their imaginations wherever they may lead.

Ill Fitting Bikini Top is an uncomfortable work because the joke seems to be on the woman, and it’s not a very good joke at that. Wesley is more graceful and sincere when he is picturing male experience: Chocolate Major (2002), for instance, which features a fat man painted entirely in brown (could this be a rare Wesleyan shadow?) or Blue Blanket (2000), in which a naked bald sad-sack grabs at a blanket while his comely bed-mate casts her eyes wearily past him, perhaps to the door. With each couple in the exhibition, the eyes of one are open and the eyes of the other closed or downcast. Really, these are not pictures of meetings but missed connections, failing communication, the inability of one person to reach out to another.

Jonathan Griffin
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source: contemporaryartdaily

“Elaborate good humor to downright damned foolishness in Western visible arts is scarce. Jack Wesley can deal them with weird eccentric precision––just about as well as any artist whom I know. And he has a long, irreverent history to prove it all. I salute you, dear Jack, as one hell of a sly wise painterly adept. So Paul Klee to you, good guy.”
––Dan Flavin, in John Wesley Paintings, exhibition catalogue, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, 1990.
Objects and Paintings includes paintings and sculptures from several periods in Wesley’s career; all of them point to the “eccentric precision,” as Flavin described it, that has made him one of the indispensible American artists of the post-war period. Over the course of his half-century career, Wesley has created an amalgamation of minimalist, surrealist, and pop vocabularies that taps into the cultural unconscious. His formal universe, which is predicated on patterning, seriality, and a particularly deliberate use of line and color, brings together references and images of all kinds.
As such, the rarely seen sculptures on view in the exhibition shed light on the paintings for which Wesley is best known. Essentially paintings in their own right, the objects provided the artist with the opportunity to apply his imagery to readymade objects. In Bird Lovers (1973), two of Wesleyʼs iconic pink females bow toward one another in perfect compositional symmetry while a pink bird hovers atop the blue expanse of a motorcycle helmet. The nude figures suggest a complex attitude towards eroticism: sulky, submissive, and titillating but also wild and free, tied to the momentʼs easy rider counterculture.
In this regard, the objects become a means of further exploring the psychosexual motifs of Wesleyʼs work—extra hardware in his cultural toolbox. Other sculptures include two riffs on the bikini, a table, a nutcracker, and a ‘folding boat’ fashioned of unstructured canvas. The latter functions both as a pop-inflected soft form reminiscent of Oldenburg as well as a kind of critique of the unassailable status of the objective, neutral support in painting. Gestures like these show Wesley circumventing the grand narratives of modernist art historical development in order to create what Dave Hickey has described as a contemporary American form of allegory, “the restoration of traditional genre in cartoon drag.”
The paintings on view made during the late 1990s and early 2000s, demonstrate the fluidity with which Wesley is able to address a variety of subjects and moods. Woman on Top, from 1996, is an erotic picture whose strength of line and composition make it feel like a landscape of flesh; despite its flatness and monochromatic background, it boasts a complex series of negative spaces and a surprisingly layered sense of perspective.
Chocolate Major, meanwhile, depicts the upper third of a nude woman against a preternaturally blue sky and a lawn of green grass. The lower part of her body is obscured by the flat brown bust of a man who, despite the economy with which he is rendered, peers out from the picture plane as if he were suspicious of the whole endeavor, whatever that endeavor might be. Wesley’s dream-like logic (puns, both visual and linguistic, are pervasive in the works themselves and their titles) puts forth a vernacular surrealism that takes culture at its word, and responds so literally to its prompts that its subjects emerge transformed, more familiar and more strange. Wesleyʼs figures, in all their ambiguity, are metaphors, avatars or vessels of a cultureʼs confused libido.
In addition to numerous group shows, Wesleyʼs work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions since the early 1960s. Surveys have been held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Chinati Foundation, Marfa; MoMA PS1, Long Island City; the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and Kunsthalle Nuremberg, among other venues. In 2009, the Fondazione Prada presented a solo exhibition of Wesleyʼs work during the Venice Biennale, which was accompanied by an expansive catalog edited by Germano Celant. Since 2004, the Chinati Foundation has maintained a permanent gallery housing its collection of Wesleyʼs paintings, as was intended by Judd since the foundationʼs inception. Wesley lives and works in New York.