“Boom or Bust in the Bay”
"Despite the gloom and doom, the folks at Gallery Wendi Norris suggested to me that it had been a good year for the gallery, and judging by the Marie Wilson show on display there, it’s no wonder why. The paintings and drawings on view are a mash-up of delicious morsels, a grab bag of Surrealist and visionary art: a little of Wifredo Lam’s curves, dots, and dashes; overlapping waves of glowing colors that brought to mind Agnes Pelton; the gestural cartoons of Joan Miró; and grids and geometries suggestive of Hilma af Klint.
A native of Northern California, Wilson fell in with the Dynatons in the early 1950s, practitioners of a distinctly Californian vein of Surrealism that shared the European movement’s forms and general desire for direct mind-body connection, yet was informed not by the Freudian unconscious but by a swirl of Native American culture, astrophysics, extraterrestrial life, Zen Buddhism, and sundry other versions of theosophic mindfulness (very California). Founded by Lee Mullican, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Wolfgang Paalen, the movement migrated from Paris to Mexico during World War II and eventually found a home in the burgeoning counterculture of the early-1950s Bay Area. (The group was the subject of a 1951 show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.) At Wendi Norris, Wilson’s works from the latter half of the 1950s, such as Rites of Passage, 1957–58, or View over the Atlantis, 1958–59, are a joy to perceive—like psychedelic Rorschach tests exploding with biomorphic forms."
