THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 26, 1999
Roberta Smith

JOHN WESLEY
Fredericks Freiser Gallery

John Wesley’s refined posterish style and subtle mixings of past and present Americana are so consistent that it is sometimes hard to notice his little ups and downs. This show, his 25th New York gallery show since 1963, is a definite up; every painting seems perfect and fresh, a charged drama of formal and human interaction.

Usually the charge is sexual, implicit in the fastidiously painted female bodies and faces, and in the contrast of Mr. Wesley’s longtime palette of nursery pinks and blues which are invariably brought to attention by crisp additions of black (beginning with outlines) and white.

The sweetness and measure of these images, and their slight datedness, lend a veneer of decorum to an undeniable adult eroticism. In Kissing Blonde, a man with marcelled hair and mustache (descended from a barber-shop quartet) kisses the shoulder of a modern woman; her face registers pleasure, a sharp sucking in of the breath. Sometimes the implied relationship is more complex, as in a close-up image of two heads; a pensive man in sunglasses, and a rather determined if waterlogged-looking woman in a bathing cap. The title is Boat Race, and she’s clearly more interested in winning than he is.

The same sense of emotional tension and edge of sadness is also apparent in Boyfriends, in which we look over the shoulder of a woman as she looks towards the middle of a lake where two men paddle toward her in a canoe. Is she choosing? The space of this painting, while contradicted as usual by the flat colors, is generously deep and seems new for Mr. Wesley.

Sometimes the frisson is simply funny. In Wow! Whoops Oh Boy! As sea gull seems to have been goosed by an ocean wave whose crinkled lettuce-leaf edges suggest revved-up Hiroshige. The crinkling is electric, thrilling, and one of the ways Mr. Wesley animates his compositions. In addition to water, he usually reserves it for black hair, where it intimates a kind of animal strangeness and emotional turbulence bubbling quietly beneath the surface, waiting.

Mr. Wesley’s achievement has always been placed somewhere near to, but outside of, Pop Art, and this intimation of real-life feeling beneath his artifice is one of the things that keeps him separate.