On Wiedel:

“Hillbilly art”? I stumbled upon great paintings by Jesse Wiedel. I don’t know if he’s amateur painter or if he cunningly impersonates amateur painter. His works remind me of the stuff I see painted on amusement park rides. —Fuxoft at 21:47 (Blogger from Prague)

These are the people I work with every day. —A police officer at Wiedel’s opening

His art is wacktastic. —Nicole Eisenman

He has a hard time rescuing banality in the service of his narrative. —David Hunt

In “Haunted Trailer Park,” his first New York painting show, Jesse Wiedel brings the trailer culture antics of Raising Arizona to a new pitch of comic demoralization. His hard-scrabble ne’er-do-wells just can’t get enough of beating themselves up. Demons hang out and bad people do bad things and they just don’t seem to go away.

Wiedel’s everyman style of picture-making blends this low comedy tomfoolery with the in-your-face moral directness of Jehova’s Witness pamphlets. The signature color blurs of methamphetamine-induced psychedelia bleed woefully into abstraction.

This is society on its last legs, in the real-life vicinity of California’s poisoned Salton Sea, where failures and agonies litter the desert vistas and the boundaries between living and dead are porous. The landscape is layered with the wreckage of comfort-food kitsch of the 1930s-’50s, from when the lake was almost a thriving resort.

By the 1960s, the massive ecological disaster of 1905-07 that created the lake unleashed its final legacy in the ongoing and smelly die-off of fish and birds. It fell off realtors’ maps then. And for decades now, it has been a very cheap place to live. Bikers love it. Meth pervades. Led Zeppelin still echoes in the hills. Mainstream consumer culture keeps its distance. For Wiedel, it is a retreat into the jellied heart of America.

Jesse Wiedel resides in Eureka, California.