Catalogue essay
President's Gallery, Chicago State University
November 3rd to December 12th, 1997

John Pitman Weber: Night Scenes
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Long concerned with social issues as the subjects for his murals and studio paintings, John Weber's current work addresses personal, even autobiographical topics as well. Almost overshadowing his more longstanding preoccupation with the nature of interpersonal communication, responsibility, and behavior, the works in this exhibition become meditations on life's meaning in the face of death, questions about the possibility of transcendence, and the implications such reflections may have in decisions regarding life's direction.

From 1994 to present, Weber developed two differently structured groupings of grisaille drawings, prints, and paintings which convey somewhat different approaches to similar dilemmas. The first grouping begins with single images of dark, atmospheric roads in rural settings. Empty and mysterious, they direct us toward unknown destinations. Zooming down the roads of later, often larger paintings, are powerful tanker trucks that imbue the merely ominous, unearthly atmosphere of the initial paintings with a new presence of terror and danger. In these pieces, an exaggerated perspective heightens the viewpoint from which we, as spectator or artist, participate in the scene from a fixed position. We are also in a car, driving in the foreground of the picture, just below and outside the image.

In other works, the road pictures become more complex with the addition of framing devices meant to add associated, and sometimes contradictory messages, which decenter and problematize the formerly concise meanings. Here are strips of associated words, altering and repeating, embellishing by other bands in which appear images conveying futility, emptiness, and incipient danger. Obscure Gestures depicts an empty road framed with the words, "nothing at all", accompanied by hand gestures suggesting a translatable meaning, but in fact, communicating nothing at all. In another painting, the alternating words, the alternating words, "conceal" and "deny" (front cover), appear in banners above and below the image, further framed on top and bottom by spaces populated with hieroglyph-like images of closed‑off stairways, burned matches, and families watching screen patterns on TV. In the 1996 painting Openl/Closed, the heightened emotions, pessimism, and contradictions become more stark, with words such as "open,"  "possibility," "inevitable," and "too late," forming the top and bottom frame, while the sides are lined with images of telephones lying off the hook, chattering teeth, and empty drawers.

Other motifs, some referring to interrupted communications (shielded eyes that cannot see, emptying reels of telephone wires, magnifying glasses, cupped ears), or to emptiness (tipped cups, empty boxes) and danger (images of fires) are further explored in a second constellation of paintings. In these, the centralized images and their accompanying framing devices are replaced by the hieroglyphs, which are enclosed in squared‑off sections and gridded to become the overall subject themselves. They are fundamentally a flattened‑out game board of icons representing competing ideas. Unlike the strong focus and directionality of the roads, the gridded images provide no directions for their apprehension. One is free to "read" them sequentially, in a standard left to right, top to bottom format, but one could also arbitrarily dip into the pictures at any point, understand and relate them to each other randomly, or create new schemas of one's own. While the above mentioned themes remain the same, our understanding or interpretation of them is more open to the viewer's discretion.

In this extended body of work, Weber's ongoing idealistic preoccupation with material and societal concerns achieves new clarity and significance as he, beginning with ruminations on his own life events, projects their pictorial development onto a social scale as well. In subject matter referring to unknown future, death, concerns with identity, and a desire for understanding and communication, he finds no easy answers, no solutions for life's enigmas; his nuanced images and confounded meanings are laced with substantial doubt, but also with courage. For the viewer, his work ultimately posits the dilemma of where meaning is actually located: in the process of making it, or in any definitive outcome.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.