John Wesley

was born in Los Angeles, California in 1928. His training comprised evening classes at the Los Angeles City College and the University of California. In 1952, he started working as a riveter with Lockheed Aircraft. One year later, he transferred to Northrop Aircraft, where he was hired as an illustrator. It was in this period that he started to paint. In 1959 he married the artist Jo Baer. 

Wesley's work was characterised from the beginning by a sparse use of colour to support a flat graphic picture, like that used in comics and cartoons. He was fascinated in particular by rhythm (sequence) and decorative principles in which the figurative and the abstract overlap, sometimes inclining towards a total visual principle, like in the work of M.C. Escher. 

Wesley, however, was never to walk into the trap into which his aforementioned fellow artist repeatedly tumbled. Wesley is wary of an 'educational' and too smart an approach. On the contrary, his sense of humour guards him against an illustrative fate. His interest in pin-up aesthetics and a refined sense of eroticism and boyish excitement send him in the opposite direction. He constructs such fascination with a sharp sense of serialism and retinalism, which caught the attention of minimalists like Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. 

The latter exhibited Wesley regularly in Marfa (Texas), where he combined his atelier, living accommodation and gallery. Over the past five years, John Wesley has become a very successful artist. His participation in the exhibition is restricted to about forty works, which serve as a reminder for a long sojourn in the unknown.