John Wesley (artist)
[1][2][3] Wesley's art largely remained true to artistic premises that he established in the 1960s: a comic-strip style of flat shapes, delicate black outline, a limited matte palette of saturated colors, and elegant, pared-down compositions.
[4][5] His characteristic subjects included cavorting nymphs, nudes, infants and animals, pastoral and historical scenes, and 1950s comic strip characters in humorously blasphemous, ambiguous scenarios of forbidden desire, rage or despair.
[11][12][6][13] Artforum's Jenifer Borum described Wesley's work as combining "a Pop vocabulary, a refined Minimal sensibility, and a surrealistic proclivity for uncanny juxtapositions,"[9] while Dave Hickey likened him to an eighteenth-century Rococo "fabulist," citing his penchant for erotic narrative.
[3][10][23] Drawing on both experiences, he incorporated simple, functional line, matte cyanotype-blue color and iconic postal forms (shields, stamps, seals) in banner- and plaque-like paintings influenced by the deadpan imagery of Jasper Johns and related to work by Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol.
[6][15][24] Although Wesley disliked explaining his work or being didactic,[10][24] his jarring couplings (e.g., human-animal) and Minimalist-like repetitions of figures—repositioned and manipulated in paper-doll fashion in rows or patterns—suggest elusive narratives, deeply personal, mysterious meanings and irreverent social content.
He placed cartoonish, expressively posed group and individual portraits and historical figures in vacant spaces, framed by symmetrical, Art Nouveau-like borders of flowers, birds or—in The Aviator's Daughters (1963)—silhouetted World War I biplanes, creating a counterpoint of masculine and feminine.
[39][11][36] In the middle of the decade, this imagery gave way to unsettling erotic paintings of nude and semi-clothed figures (often seemingly oblivious women) and personified animals—frogs, camels, bears, apes, birds, squirrels—some arranged in repetitive frieze-like formations with flat-painted borders.
"[5][35] In formal terms, these paintings were characterized by a freer use of line, more open compositions, and intensified color palettes dominated by candy pinks, baby blues, flesh beiges and hospital greens;[13][40] thematically, they often took a farcical, yet incisive look at gender relations, paternal power and mortality.
[9][6][12] A particular preoccupation was the cowlicked, Chic Young character Dagwood Bumstead, from Blondie, who critics such as Linda Norden wrote, functioned as a stand-in for Wesley's missing father, allowing him to access the people, domestic spaces and pathos of his childhood.
[41][32] A series in the 1990s employed nude women—often radically cropped with their faces out of view or eyes closed—variously cooing down at viewers (as if seen from a suckling infant's perspective), floating as enveloping, oceanic bodies, or lying prone and vulnerable in the throes of ecstasy.
Dominated by expanses of flesh against blue sky, works such as Smooch (2003) depicted men and women in tight close-ups of heads, necks, shoulders and hands and seemed to suggest intense moments, memories or daydreams of intimacy.
