GQSTYLE MAGAZINE
By Zach Baron
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| Two panels of a five-panel jazz painting originally titled "The Greatest Album of All Time” |
CALIFORNIA---
Wes Lang spends most of his time in his studio, in Boyle Heights, 11,000 square feet amid a warren of low brick and cinder-block warehouses just east of Los Angeles's Arts District, quiet but for the commotion of trucks. He entertains visitors here frequently, with one rule: no photographs. In part, this is because Lang is a private person—“I'm impossible to find,” he says in his matter-of-fact way. “I really am. You can't get to me unless you know someone I know.” At the moment, Lang has four drawings, all in his manic,
Cy-Twombly-by-way-of-
Basquiat style, tacked up on the east wall—the one he's finishing now is a gift for a friend. [
link]
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| Welcome to Wes World, where every aspect of the L.A. painter's universe—the cars, the jewelry, the soaring spaces—is an attempt to make the world more his own. It's as though the real canvas is life itself. |
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| Lang's primary subject is actually a bygone sort of innocence: It's about what it felt like to be a certain kind of kid at a certain time. His paintings look like the walls of his teenage bedroom, or like the tattoos on the guys around him when he was a kid. |
