Wiley World

Wiley's paintings are so much more meaningful than the "pretty boy" examples in Mr. Keeps story. Mr. Keeps failed to even fill out a basic bio on the artist. Am I to assume that he is untrained except for a weekend program at Cal State and junior high comic book character? Mr. Keeps just didn't tell us. Mr. Keeps also didn't tell us about the profound affect Mr. Wiley's work can have on youths who are usually outside the art and aesthetic crowd. Mr. Keeps also neglects to tell us how Wiley has the humor and irony of borrowing from historic styles, mostly neoclassical. Mr. Keeps article was shallow, with narrow examples of Wiley's work- connecting Wiley to rap is way too easy and represents very little of Mr. Wiley's work.

From the beginning of his professional career, Wiley has made clear that he uses photography as source material. (Expense aside, how many of these young men could be counted on to return for days of formal "sittings?") There are YouTube vignettes that show how Wiley works. Yes, there are collaborations. Yes, there are technical devices that show on close examination. One can find the same revelations of technique in Goya, Whistler and Picasso - to name only a famous few. Gwenn's acquaintance with portraiture seems to come mostly from art books, where the means never show.

I went to hear Wiley speak at my local museum in conjunction with an exhibition of his work, and the whole experience was throughly disappointing. - The artist was 30 minutes late in arriving for the engagement, and neither he nor the museum staff apologized for his behavior. - When Wiley did show up, he revealed (with some questioning from an audience better informed than me) that he's hardly a portraitist. He often does not meet his subjects, instead painting from photos taken by his team. Further, the subjects are only photographed after the team has Wiley-ized their look. The subjects' personhood couldn't be less valued...and isn't that what portraiture is about? - When I went to see the works on display, I discovered that Wiley (or his team?) doesn't even use enough paint to cover the pencil marks of the under-drawing. The irony: I loved his work before I saw him or it in person.

I first saw Kehinde's work at a gallery in Chicago, several years ago. The impact of his pictures, seen face to face, is enormous. The tension between the identity of his subjects and their stilted poses, often drawn from the age of the Baroque, the posters of the Red Guard or the over-grand homages to the ruling powers of another day, is camp taken to a higher level. These beautiful young men - and they are often quite beautiful - seem not out of place in Wiley's art historical fantasies, no matter how affected their gestures or bizarre their painted backgrounds. Perhaps this is because we really don't know them any better than we know the kings and saints they replace on canvass. They are as exotic and distant to most gallery goers as the traditions of court painting Wiley celebrates with his brilliant technique. Divides of color and class are as potent now as they were hundreds of years ago. .