THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 25, 2005~Ken Johnson

JOHN WESLEY
Don’t Eat My Eagle: Paintings From the 1960’s
Fredericks & Freiser

Because his paintings resembled cartoons, John Wesley was herded onto the Pop Art bandwagon in the 1960's. But works from that decade in this wonderful exhibition have less to do with consumerism, commercial imagery and industrial manufacturing than with personal memory, desire and fantasy. Mr. Wesley was a Surrealist secret agent traveling under Pop Art cover.

Besides a formal dimension acute enough to win the admiration of the young artist and critic Donald Judd - who reserved a permanent space for Mr. Wesley's works at his compound in Marfa, Tex. - what is notable here is the convergence of erotic and zoological imagery. A white female nude languorously reclines above three laughing pink frogs; five shapely legs protrude from the bill of Donald Duck in the hilarious "Gluttony"; a man with the head of a camel apparently plunges his hand and forearm into the rear end of a feminine camel who seems pleasantly surprised; and a rare three-dimensional, box-shaped piece is decorated by images of voluptuous female nudes, gamboling bears and fornicating squirrels.

Some of Mr. Wesley's early shield-shaped compositions are included, and his often puzzling interest in historical subjects is represented by portraits of King Faisal and Rudyard Kipling. All of which enhance the mind-expanding feeling of a creative imagination plumbing the deeper and stranger waters of collective American consciousness.