Wes Christensen

COMPRESSED NARRATIVES

By Michael Laurence

Thought Insertion, 1983, 7 x 5 inches

In a letter he recently wrote about the fiction of Rachel Ingalls, Wes Christensen inadvertently described his own art. “She relates the bizarre in a laconic prose – she compresses the form without [resorting to] Borgesian turgidity. The plot accelerates to breakneck speed while seeming, all the while, leisurely and relaxed.”

Like Ingalls, Christensen works in small formats inhabited by characters acting out compressed narratives. The actors engage in peculiar activities rendered in a perfectly realistic way. These images, which linger long after viewing, invite the viewer into the dramatic perplexity of situations made bizarre by odd juxtapositions – a hammer, a gun, a television out of place. Anyone who would admit, as Christensen does, to watching “Zulu Dawn” on television with the sound off, while listening to Purcell’s tenor and countertenor duets, fully comprehends the surrealistic mating of an umbrella and a pair of scissors on an operating table.

The importance of scale is immediately apparent in Christensen’s work. His images are as tight as 2” x 3”, and they enlarge, at most, to a monumental 7” x 5”. In his conversations about art, his references are often given in exceedingly knowledgeable literary terms. He states that cropping is used to focus attention and to act as a compositional device; cropping is a tool also used by modern English writers as diverse as Jean Rhys or Penelope Gilliat, or by an American such as Renate Adler, or by the French woman Marguerite Duras.

All of these writers deliberately limit their scale and intensify the story telling aspect of their writing. Self-enclosed stories reveal characters caught physically or psychologically in angular circumstances. In both the works of these writers and in Christensen’s art, we become voyeurs as we peer through tiny windows at intimate scenes occurring in the theater of the perverse mind. What, for example, is taking place in Christensen’s Thought Insertion, with its reference to psychology and with its depiction of a man holding out a menacing red wrench? The other man, meanwhile, holds an architect’s tools. Ambiguity in The Letter, similarly, is intensified into mystery by the drama of the revolver almost incidentally placed in the woman’s hand.

Christensen wrote the following direct yet artfully illusive, definition of his work: “My images present ambivalent moments, points of decision (like approaches to a forked path), implied action, and anxious choices (quite linear both in time and in physical space). Characters are caught between anticipation and regret.”

Research, 1984, watercolor and gouache, 5” x 5”.

Also evident is Christensen’s affinity with past masters of figurative painting in the interior setting, such as Vermeer, van Eyck, and Holbein. Christensen, however, takes not only his sense of scale but also his techniques from English rather than continental artists. These techniques are based on Victorian principles of watercolor, such as those practiced by Holman Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelites. Their methods included the use of strong white underpainting and layers of transparent glazes that were varnished so that a watercolor on paper was barely discernible from an oil painting.

Christensen’s background in printmaking – with its attention to minute detail and disciplined craft – and his illustrations for publications on Mayan archaeological studies contribute to his methodology and to his content. Research, a study in triangular placement within a rectangular situation, fuses the precision of his printmaking background with his Mayan references.

With all his bravura watercolor technique, Christensen still prefers that his craft be transparent. The narrative is the point. Edgy dramas raise questions: for instance, who is the man alone in 4 Eyes, and why is he using a blood-red phone and looking at us? And why do we see the frame-within-a-frame (the TV) from Salvador Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou? The scene that follows this image is a razor slashing an eyeball. Terror here appears only after a specific art-historical reading.

The Letter, 1982, watercolor and gouache, 6” x 4”.

The specific clues in Christensen’s, ambivalent, anxious worlds, thus, deflect us from predictable assumptions. The viewer must complete the picture, not through simple reasoning, but through knowledge and association. An essay on Sartre by Iris Murdoch connects indirectly to Wes Christensen’s paintings. “The novel,” wrote Murdoch, “is properly an art of image rather than analysis.” Christensen’s images, on the other hand, form novels in which literary elements draw aesthetic strategy into their service.

VISIONS MAGAZINE, Summer 1988, Vol. 2, No. 3, LA Artcore Publication.

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