John Wesley

John Wesley

Doubles, Pairs, and Diptychs

November 10 through December 23, 2016

Fredericks & Freiser is proud to announce an exhibition of paintings by John Wesley.  “Doubles, Pairs, and Diptychs” highlights three modes of Wesley’s painting practice: paintings that extend beyond a single canvas; individual works that are conceived formally or conceptually as pairs; and individual works that have virtually identical compositions in which small shifts in color, scale, and line create distinct visualizations.
 
What becomes apparent in “Doubles, Pairs, and Diptychs,” is that Wesley often used these three methods as a means to heighten or accentuate repetition. The twelve paintings included here employ motifs such as the frieze, ornamental borders, overall patterning and the mirrored duplication of an image.

Though formally linked to minimalism due to the essentiality and compositional rigor of his production, Wesley's repetitions were celebrated by everyone from Donald Judd and Lucy Lippard to Germano Celant and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev as an important addition to Pop Art. However, Wesley has always stood apart from his contemporaries. While others used repetition to define modern thought, standardized production, or commercial serialization, Wesley shook loose something far stranger.  Unlike Warhol, for instance, for whom repetition acted as an accelerator pushing an image almost filmically, Wesley used the multiplication of an image to slow things down, to break an image from itself and suggest a chasm of meaning, a sudden rupture in certainty.