HAIKU REVIEW:John Weston calls his ecstatic, painfully bright canvases and works on paper "pleasure paintings," logically enough: he invests his doggedly symmetric and elaborated patterned formal schemes with a bubble-gum-psychedelic palette, managing all the while to strew his amped-up visual field with wild, unpredictable, totally fun shapes. Weston clearly inherits a post-Pop strain of what can best be called electric funk, suggesting as it does a hybrid of Hairy Who, Pattern & Decoration, Pop Surrealism, and underground-comic head-tripping. Most of the artistic phenomena upon which Weston draws, then, are several decades old, but, he proves, have lost none of their potency or their potential; all it took is someone (in the digital age, perhaps) to re-examine and re-exploit their visual principles and to re-understand our need to be dazzled.
- Peter Frank