Hot rod painter Keith Weesner wonders what would happen if Fairlanes could fly
By Theo Douglas

An Art Center dropout, Long Beach native Keith Weesner spent the ’90s sketching backgrounds for the various Batman TV series before turning full-time to his own ideas. Which might seem to put him behind assorted of his pop surrealist contemporaries (if that’s how to describe his acrylics of rocket-brassiered, angora-sweatered trophy queens; vivid, Metalflaked, chrome-wheeled rods and customs; and the juvenile delinquents who love them). But Weesner’s first solo show at Santa Monica’s Copro/Nason Gallery finds him pacing the field—maybe pulling out to pass.

He’s earned an unparalleled reputation with hot rodders for painting cars they actually want to build—and, in at least three cases, have built. (Full disclosure: he did a rendering 12 years ago of my ’63 Falcon—and, predictably, it never looked that good in real life.) At least one of his canvases here—Strong Mixture, of a ’28-’29 Ford Model A pickup with a chrome ’32 Ford grille, six carburetors and a frail sipping some kind of brew out of a ceramic skull—screams to be pieced together immediately in a termite-ridden, dirt-floored garage.

But what’s new are about a half-dozen works brushed onto round-cornered sheets of plywood—a new way of presentation for the artist—and depicting a series of scenes straight out of Ford Motor Company’s design studios of the ’50s.

Like other car makers, FoMoCo in the ’50s mined hot rodders’ fertile imaginations for ideas. Its think tanks were littered with sleek wrecks whose names (the Muroc, for example) read like a racer’s dictionary. Weesner returns the favor—to a fashion—and so one scene has a meat-faced cretin pushing a custom Harley into the bed of a spacey pickup truck that never was.

Other works bring the equation to its ravishing sum: strapless bathing-suited beauties piloting iridescent, butterfly-wheeled spaceships through gritty, hazy skyscapes of impossibly tall and sooty towers. It’s Harley-Earl-meets-Ridley-Scott—proof Rutger Hauer did not die in vain, but that butterfly chairs, mohair sweaters and speedboat-style exhausts might live. Again.

KEITH WEESNER: BRUSH WITH SPEED, AT COPRO/NASON GALLERY, BERGAMOT STATION, 2525 MICHIGAN AVE, UNIT T5, SANTA MONICA 90404. 310.829.2156. OPEN WED-SAT, 1-6PM. THROUGH APRIL 28. FREE.