Behold, as John Lytle Wilson makes his grand entrance, you’re sure to do a double-take. Wilson’s recent juxtapositions of robots and monkeys have garnered the attention of more than one hip gallery around the country, and his notoriety doesn’t appear to be waning any. It’s tough to know how to react to his work. If we’re being honest, my gut was first somewhere between rolling around on the floor with laughter and running from the room screaming, but then great art always gets a strong reaction, doesn’t it?
Wilson is artist-in-residence at a little local gallery that sits amidst artists’ studios, other galleries, and small, locally-owned shops. When he’s not painting monkey disciples of giant robots, he’s making disciples of the rest of us with his newest “corrected paintings.” About these, Wilson asserts that “occasonally, an artist will paint something, but neglect to include robots and/or monkeys. When I can, I fix that. The result? Side-splitting renderings of robots and monkeys, usually attacking the subject of someone else’s otherwise rather conservative painting:
After you get over the initial visual shock, what’s really refreshing about Wilson’s stuff is that it makes you think . . . about technology, about why you never thought about something before, about a kind of existential blues common to a postmodern technological era, about why the hell much of the population appears NOT to be thinking on a given day . . . you know, lighthearted stuff.
It’s not really that nobody else has ever thought out loud about this kind of thing through their visual art. In fact, Wilson put together an entire show featuring like-minded painters and sculptors, and his work has been featured in other contexts where such juxtapositions formed the shared artistic substance that strung the whole bit together. No, what’s really impressive about Wilson’s work is that he does it so starkly, so convincingly, so laugh-or-cry-out-loud well that you can’t help but love it.
Peter Hoesing 