‘Elaborate good humor to downright damned foolishness in Western visible arts is scarce. Jack Wesley can deal them with weird, eccentric precision - just about as well as any artist whom I know. And he has a long, irreverent history to prove it all. I salute you, dear Jack, as one hell of a sly, wise painterly adept. So Paul Klee to you, good guy.’
[Dan Flavin on John Wesley, as quoted a statement from The Chinati Foundation in, A. Heiss, ‘John Wesley: Paintings 1961-2000’, New York, 2000, p. 201]
 
Despite his close friendships with Minimalist artists, including Donald Judd or Dan Flavin, John Wesley developed a unique language of his own. Taking cutout images from the pages of magazines and newspapers, Wesley transferred them first to gouache on paper and then to acrylic on canvas in a process of increasingly graphic simplification. Although his two-dimensional, heavily outlined and stylised paintings often draw comparisons to Pop-Art, Wesley’s unusual choice of decontextualised subjects emits an atmosphere of the surreal. The obscure, dreamlike quality of his flat images negates any distinction between Surrealism, Minimalism and Pop.