In the past Michael Wetzel has focused his attention on signifiers and icons of the American class system. Previous subjects have included mysterious adolescent cliques, warring country club members and airtight bourgeois interiors. In one recent body of work, Wetzel refashioned the fabric patterns used by first ladies Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Reagan to decorate the White House into metaphors for our current divided (blue state/red state) political landscape. The concept of the “interior” and in particular of the interior of empire is expanded in this new exhibition to include landscape and the conquest, capture and commodification of the foreign or exotic. Rather than oblique references to the White House or the new world Georgian manor house we now have dark turbulent paintings of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the burning of Rome. Vesuvius, 2006, for instance, uses as a reference the concept of the English “Grand Tour” which at the height of Great Britain’s period of colonization and imperialism chose Italy (itself a former world dominator) as a pleasure ground for its tourists.

While decrepit cities like Venice and Rome were revived and converted into meccas of tourism by a Victorian appetite for the lost world of the ancients, an entire genre of parlor painting was being created to capture and bring home evidence of the empire’s expanded frontiers. A contemporary series of monkey (macague) paintings by Wetzel find their genesis in a parlor genre of Dutch origin, practiced by Gillis Claesz de Hondecoeter for one, that found its way into the English and French Empires. These works crammed as much exotic flora and fauna as possible into a precursor of the photographic postcard. Here the monkey’s look out at us and serve as a sudden and expectant mirror between the civilized and the savage, the origin of Darwinian theory and the attendant religious discomfort of its implications. There is an intricacy in the layered manner that Wetzel molds his forms with pigment and light. The color is almost woven in its application, a reminder of the woven surface of linen and of wall hangings, a lesser and more decorative form of parlor art. This challenges the pretensions of `painting’ reminding us of the vanity of collectables while simultaneously critiquing the imbedded function of accumulating wealth.

In Quo Vadis II, 2006 we see a nightscape of classical Rome burning. It is important to note that the reference to this image of a burning Roman cityscape is a model of the ancient city (much like the recently renovated one of New York at the Queens Museum) made by Italo Gismondi between 1935 and 1971 located at the Museum of Roman Civilization on Capitoline Hill. We best know the story of Nero burning Rome as the ultimate in misguided governmental stewardship. But Rome was burned and resurrected many times, had many moments of glory and was viewed by several papacies as the center of western culture. There was and always will be many forms of “Rome” as myriad Hollywood movies have tried to capture. Likewise Italian culture has been disseminated and distilled into many forms that barely resemble the original. Cuisine is a perfect example, and Wetzel slyly proffers a few paintings of pasta dishes into the exhibition to suggest the exportation of native foods is almost always portrayed as a reliable arbiter of a culture’s essence but in reality is usually a wan dilution of something that is an endangered cultural species.