THE NEW YORK TIMES, December 1, 2000~Michael Kimmelman

ART REVIEW: Comforting, Funny Outlandishness That Sticks to Its Own Logic

Art, or at least art that matters, trafficks in a space between the world as it might be and the world as it is. Whether we feel better or worse about ourselves in its midst depends on the kinds of artists involved, but either way the best artists make us linger in the spaces they concoct if only because afterward the real world comes more clearly into focus.

John Wesley has been graciously trying to tighten our grip on reality by painting extraordinarily odd and funny pictures. He has been doing this for 40 years, during which time the work, although gradually refined in little ways, has stayed essentially the same. It has maintained a steady low-decibel level of outlandishness, becoming neither more nor less explicit about its intentions, remaining a mild form of constructive lunacy with its own logic, and therefore, strangely, a comforting constant.

The art world has a handful of visionaries like Mr. Wesley, who help to keep everyone else honest. The value of his work has never gone unappreciated in New York, where he has lived since moving from Los Angeles in 1960. He has been feted, cultishly, but only now is he the recipient of a full-dress local retrospective. Alanna Heiss, P. S. 1's director, has put it together, splendidly.

You may not enjoy the show. Simple pleasure is not the intended effect of an ironic but indispensable art whose target, frustratingly, seems never quite in focus. Mr. Wesley rode Pop's second wave to initial success. He borrowed and altered photographs and illustrations from magazines and comics: Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead, Donald Duck and young women -- dark-haired young women, often naked. Plenty of them.

Painted, the pictures look stylized and flat, like coloring-book designs, with delicate black outlines, their weird, pasty, off-key hues a Wesley trademark: baby blue, hospital green, pink, damp gray and purple.

From the start the images repeated in rows or patterns, as if mechanically produced except for irregularities, shifts of color or line, sometimes accidental but also intentional: disruptions, gaps in the pictorial continuum, that grab our attention disproportionately.

The repetitions are obsessive and alarming, not automatic. These images sometimes spill over decorative borders that Mr. Wesley paints as frames within the real frames, double frames being an equivalent of air quotes: hand gestures to convey ironic intent.

The allusions are numerous: to Matisse, Hokusai, Greek vase painting, Art Nouveau, Toulouse-Lautrec; the list goes on. Mr. Wesley was first associated with Pop and also linked with Minimalism, because of his spare, repetitious style, but really he belongs to Surrealism, which accounts both for his embrace of accident and his erotic stress.

This is eroticism minus obvious emotion, which amounts to pornography, from which the work is just spared by its clarity, purity of line and ritual formality. The emotion, although not obvious, is there below the exterior.

It is pathos, mostly. Mr. Wesley offers up sex as unquenchable desire and woeful male inadequacy, a black comedy of men chasing after women they can only dream about. The dreams are terrific. But the archetypal man is Dagwood: inept mediocrity.

It is useful to know that in 1940, when he was 12, Mr. Wesley found his father dead from a heart attack on the bathroom floor. His widowed mother sent him for a while to an orphanage. After high school he became an aircraft riveter and later worked as an illustrator interpreting blueprints for Northrop Aircraft, an exacting job that dovetailed with his art. When he moved to New York he got a job at the Post Office but had already started to show his paintings in exhibitions. During his 30's he became a full-time artist.

About his first Blondie and Dagwood paintings, of their empty house, he has explained: “It is really my house when I was little. Those lamps, those curtains, that chair, they were in my house then. It is really my father I am looking for. My father was like Bumstead. He was thin like Bumstead, and he wore a tie to work and when he came home from work, he tipped his hat to the neighbors.”

Useful information, but we want to know even more after looking at the pictures, which are so extravagantly loopy and mysterious: rows of dancing Dagwoods between rows of crashing waves (''Dagwood Wave Dancer''); Dagwood, screaming, in a straitjacket (''Bumstead in Bedlam''); a man wearing only gartered socks and pursuing a giant swan (''Leda and the Man''); four Draculas and a woman in a green dress (''Suzanna and the Lugosis''); a close-up of identical full-lipped women about to kiss (''Good Night''); one man biting the nose of another, who sheds a single, heartbreaking tear (''Jack Frost''); a man sitting alone facing an empty sofa.

In ''Good Night,'' the space between the two mouths leaps forward as an arabesque, an abstraction vying for our attention along with the sexy women. In ''Jack Frost'' the two men, almost twins, create another animated shape out of the space between their noses.

But what's absent from these paintings matters at least as much to our reaction: the art's refusal to explain itself, its coy, even morbid silence. The tear down the man's cheek. The man in the empty room. What do they mean? They leave us without a perch from which to understand why we find something funny so sad.

Looking at Mr. Wesley's art, as at much of the world, to which we return, finally, we are made aware of a great gap. It's the gap between what we see and what we grasp, which we fill with awkward laughter.

''John Wesley: Paintings 1961-2000'' remains at the P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Street, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084, through Jan. 14.

Published: 12 - 01 - 2000 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 1 , Page 33.