Utamaro Washing, Bumstead Sleeping

...In 2003, following the earlier, anticipatory digression of Japanese Ladies (1984), [John Wesley's] focus on the figure of the geisha and her erotic relations=as articulated in the prints of Kitagawa Utamaro=leads him to bring the Japanese world into an interaction with the American one. Once again the choice of referent is fully and deeply thought out: the main subject of Utamaro's brightly colored woodcuts is Japanese houses of pleasure. They depict relatively uncensored unions in which the eroticism arises not only from the sexual scene represented, but also from the sensual manner of the lines, while the gaze looking onto the scene is somewhat ironic and detached... the printing technique and the visual result exalt the very sort of vision and flat painting typical of Wesley's methods, and anticipate the rise, in 1970s Japan, of the superflat postnaturalism of the manga and anime cartoons and the superflat paintings of Takashi Murakami. Like the manga comics, which have been called "images with no logical sense" and which draw inspiration from another master of the woodcut, Katsushika Hokusai, and are read in the opposite direction as Western comics, Wesley creates a random connection between Geishas and Bumstead. In so doing he adds yet another facet to his vision of the feminine, which seems more and more peopled by unlucky women who fall prey to the manipulations of stupid, tasteless men, whom the artist likens to the early turkeys painted in Turkeys (1965)...In the cartoon, the male category is represented by Bumstead, a frustrated clerk and crazy husband with an endless penchant for hysteria and laziness. He appears in...Utamaro Washing, Bumstead Sleeping (2003) playful, comical pairings that once again lead to an implied erotic encounter...or end in a situation of sexual frustration...The incessant passage between parallel lives recapitulates, in relatively few pictures, the invisible aspect of Wesley's personal trajectory, for if the geisha is an idealized vehicle for Utamaro, Bumstead is the portrait of a sublime comicality: the artist's own. And since Utamaro's name appears in the title of each of these paintings, the creative parallelism between the Eighteenth-century master of the woodcut and the Twentieth-century American artist produces a concatenation of possible mirrorings that also imply self-criticism, and are thus doubly ironic: Bumstead, in the painting, is the equivalent of Utamaro, thus Bumstead is inevitably Wesley. In such a conclusion the double is manipulated ad infinitum and manages to exorcise, in lucid fashion, the danger of becoming an over-serious, pass artist. Indeed, from 2003 onwards, Wesley-Bumstead appears lucidly aware of objectifying the reality of a life=his own and others'=that should be viewed in comic spirit...In his art, it is not objects such as the umbrella and sewing machine that in their chance encounter make love on a dissection table, as conceived by poets and painters from the Comte de Lautramont to Salvador Dal; it is human figures, including their "doubles," as represented by characters from cartoons and the imaginary world of art. Thus, do Wesley's paintings establish themselves in modern art as further places of desire and pleasure forever able to renew themselves, up to the present day
(G. Celant, "Sensual Appraisal," John Wesley, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2009, pp. XLIV-XLV).