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Lot Essay
The application of a thick painterly white border cages a cartoon chimera from leaping out of the picture plane in spite of its sign-like flatness carefully composed onto the surface with hard black outlines that conceptually blur the condition between drawn and painted the signature imagery of a Surrealist. Red, yellow, blue, black and white - the limited color range of a Minimalist. The appropriation of cartoon characters familiar but twisted to insinuate unexpected interactions between images the iconography of a Pop artist. Breton Sailor is a paramount example of John Wesleys work that forces disparate moments together and weaves a unique kind of collage involving not static reproduction but dynamic construction.
The head of Donald Duck bred with the body of Popeye amalgamate to produce a perverse offspring from the conjunction of characters from different worlds. The osmosis in Breton Sailor is the point of consummation of an erotic metaphor that subtly represents a challenge to the conventional form of narration and even more so, that of painting.
As subtly but profoundly demonstrated in Breton Sailor, John Wesley, since 1963, has been upsetting the romantic conventions inherent to the comic strip. Throughout the history of painting, artists have aimed to depict the world as they see it either conceptually or figuratively focused through the lens of a sensitive eye. To this end, contemporary masters including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jeff Koons have adopted the traditional cartoon format of narrative to tell the story of imaginary characters through illustrations inserted in boxes aligned to a visual rhythm. In their representational structure, cartoons not only tell stories of characters in accordance with broadly palpable stereotypes, but also offer a double vision, a narrative about society as perceived by the creators consciousness. These narrative panels create worlds parallel to everyday reality and establish themselves as believable in spite of the impossible metaphors to common life, sharply drawn, and in the case of Breton Sailor, with a uniquely Wesley-ian element of transgression.
Wesley's working process draws attention to his close relationships with Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, or his ex-wife Jo Baer. However, despite their friendships, he develops a language of his own, translates it into a possible reality and then via painting, eliminates the seams from the cutout materials often sourced from the pages of a book or a newspaper. Wesley leaves no gaps in the painting and as the dislocation becomes imperceptible, so too does the distinction between Surrealism, Minimalism and Pop-Art. What is left is an art that defies genre but to say, its Wesley.
The head of Donald Duck bred with the body of Popeye amalgamate to produce a perverse offspring from the conjunction of characters from different worlds. The osmosis in Breton Sailor is the point of consummation of an erotic metaphor that subtly represents a challenge to the conventional form of narration and even more so, that of painting.
As subtly but profoundly demonstrated in Breton Sailor, John Wesley, since 1963, has been upsetting the romantic conventions inherent to the comic strip. Throughout the history of painting, artists have aimed to depict the world as they see it either conceptually or figuratively focused through the lens of a sensitive eye. To this end, contemporary masters including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jeff Koons have adopted the traditional cartoon format of narrative to tell the story of imaginary characters through illustrations inserted in boxes aligned to a visual rhythm. In their representational structure, cartoons not only tell stories of characters in accordance with broadly palpable stereotypes, but also offer a double vision, a narrative about society as perceived by the creators consciousness. These narrative panels create worlds parallel to everyday reality and establish themselves as believable in spite of the impossible metaphors to common life, sharply drawn, and in the case of Breton Sailor, with a uniquely Wesley-ian element of transgression.
Wesley's working process draws attention to his close relationships with Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, or his ex-wife Jo Baer. However, despite their friendships, he develops a language of his own, translates it into a possible reality and then via painting, eliminates the seams from the cutout materials often sourced from the pages of a book or a newspaper. Wesley leaves no gaps in the painting and as the dislocation becomes imperceptible, so too does the distinction between Surrealism, Minimalism and Pop-Art. What is left is an art that defies genre but to say, its Wesley.