Show Demonstrates the Steady Power of Wojtyla’s Paintings Over the Years

W. Haase Wojtyla has become a local legend, a James Hubbell of the painting world. His work crops up regularly at the San Diego Art Institute and in the annual Artists Guild show at the San Diego Museum of Art--often enough to give it an air of ubiquity and familiarity that deprives it of its edge.

That edge is restored, however, in his current show, “Visions/Revisions” at the Oneiros Gallery downtown (711 8th Ave., through Jan. 13). In this small, well-edited selection of 30 years’ work, the artist’s energy pulsates, as the aggression of his early brushwork gives way to the violence of his later subjects.

Wojtyla’s earliest paintings here date from 1959, when he was living in New York, clearly under the spell of Abstract Expressionism. Lines and masses of color dart impatiently across the crusty surface of “November,” testaments to the sufficiency of the artist’s physical gestures. Another early work, immediate and diaristic, incorporates newspaper clippings, excerpts from the classifieds, and letters painted directly from the tube.

The frantic, agitated surfaces of these paintings relax a bit in the ‘60s, as Wojtyla’s compositions become slightly more controlled and contained. Their loose mosaics of colored patches remain abstract, though hints of recognizable forms make fleeting appearances.

“Goodbye American Pie” (1972) exposes Wojtyla’s suggestibility to the influence of Pop Art. Its stenciled letters replace the earlier hand-scrawled notes, and its abrupt horizon supersedes the flat, dimension-less space of the expressionist work. Wojtyla never loses the pure physicality of his brushwork but from the ‘70s on, he balances it against painting that describes a subject and the spare, geometrically divided space surrounding it.

With his “Nudes in the Shower” and “Murder” series, Wojtyla adopts an uneasy figurative style reminiscent of Francis Bacon. Like Bacon, Wojtyla can make an image of even the simplest, most natural act resonate with tension. His women in the shower decompose and contort under the water’s stream. The characters in his interpretations of notorious crimes avoid the upright posture of conventional men to fold in on themselves in undecipherable tangles of flesh.

Paintings such as “The Aberrations of Albert Fish” are quietly, vaguely malign. A portable electric fan whirs in the center of the image, an innocent device bearing the weight of the criminal’s evil intentions. The writhing figure behind it is bloodstained, and one of his hands lies limply on the edge of a bathtub, the faucet drooling a single, long drop into its palm. Without actually describing the malicious, violent acts that inspired them, Wojtyla’s paintings reek with the cool, threatening spirit of evil.

Wojtyla’s fascination with crime reveals at least one facet of his character. In “Transplant” (1989), the artist delves even deeper as he recounts the physical and even the spiritual experience of his own open-heart surgery. Life, death and an ambiguous intermediate state seem to crowd into the operating room in this complex and stirring image. One recognizable leg identifies the tangled, blood-splattered mass in the center of the painting as the patient himself. The doctor sits nearby, back to the table, loose arteries landing in his lap. On the edge of the table sits the artist’s heart, independent and innocent.

Behind the knot of white flesh and blood that defines the patient looms a black, coffin-like box with one brass hinge. Above him hovers a small human figure, the artist, perhaps, separated from his body, observing his own trauma. Monumental in both size and ambition, “Transplant” aptly captures both the artist’s physical vulnerability during such an operation and the spiritual integrity needed to confront it.

Several smaller works in the show, though unremarkable, can hardly diffuse the power of this painting. Together with the haunting presence of the murder-related works, it proves that Wojtyla can still provoke and disturb, however well we think we know him.