Confronting ‘Love and Death’ at Tory Folliard Gallery

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Entering John Wilde’s exhibition “Love and Death” at Tory Folliard Gallery (through Dec. 31) will evoke newness, oldness, and chronological nowhere-ness all at once. With the contemporary revival of figuration, seeing bodies in art, and nude bodies specifically, is once again common. However, Wilde’s figures, while from a tradition that has inspired the flesh loving Zillenials, are clearly from somewhere else. They are from another time, another place, but also another dimension; one that vibrates in the plasma somewhere throughout the collective consciousness of the Northern Midwest.

One of the most spectacular figural works in the exhibition, titled Night Time Festivities at the Contessa Sansereni’s (1986) features a horizontal spread of eye-level nudes, painted silvery against a dense and sooty middle ground. The slightest appearance of a tree line places the scene in the world of landscape rather than theater. And that scaped land appears to be supernatural, with macabre accents of animistic rights, libidinous revelers, but also gruesome deaths, that were clearly not drawn from Wilde’s Wisconsin front door.

If Night Time arrives at unease through bacchanalian dynamism, another narrative figural piece in the show, A Cat, A Dagger, and an Open Door (1992), arrives at it with surreal compositional calmness. An odalisque calmly poses in front of a knife, a dagger, and a slain dog inside an empty room, but for a solitary man by the door and a ghostly head coming in from the left. Despite its date, the dreamscape evokes works of artists like René Magritte and Max Ernst who were probing their subconscious for material. Wilde’s are at the very least imagined, if not subliminal.

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Otherworldly to Mundane

That’s why it is so remarkable to see Wilde’s work go from intense otherworldliness to mundane familiarity in an instant. Still Life with Nightshade V could be classified basically as a still life foregrounded against a landscape. Very worldly stuff, indeed. And though it’s painted with a self-taught weirdness and detail that takes it out of the academy and into the idiosyncratic hinterlands, its subject matter remains decidedly concrete. It’s almost Northern European in its fussiness for worldly specifics. However, despite the tension between terrestrial and extra-terrestrial impulses in such paintings, they eventually build into some kind of universal picture Oneness. 

From still lifes of pomegranates, to silver point portraits, to surrealist dreamscapes, the common denominator in Wilde’s work is something beyond images, symbols, and their purposes in modern society. Wilde’s paintings are embodiments a deeper and greater subject. His figures hint at it in one direction with human ecstasies, in another with sublime landscapes, and in yet another with decaying fruits. His eggplants are people, and his people are eggplants. They’re all going to the same place in the end. And whatever that place is, there seems to be a portal to it floating somewhere above the land between Madison and Duluth. But also above Quetico and up to Muskrat Dam. Tom Uttech knows it. So did Aldo Leopold. Fitzgerald delivered it through Nick Carraway who knew something magical lied “in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

In a recounting of a letter from Wilde to his friend Robert Cozzolino, the artist said of one still life with mushrooms that the subjects “were literally, by this afternoon, generated into only a bare shadow of their former selves­–some were little more than a trail of dust …” Cozzolino meditates on this material temporality further in the exhibition’s catalogue essay, noting that when Wilde received a cancer diagnosis in 2006, the year of his passing, he imagined his subjects, including himself, as being a part of a two-way timeline of death and rebirth. Wilde’s understanding of subject matter was tied into these contradictory dualities: nature and denature, generation and degeneration, composition and decomposition–all across a network of cosmic energy. Everything falls apart, but no matter, because everything is everything anyway. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.