The ironies resound and redound and confound seeing even a fraction of a decade of Wesley Willis’ early work in a newly forged gallery space in the general vicinity of where he wandered while he whupped Batman’s ass but before death whupped his. “Wesley Willis: City of Many Dreams,” at Matthew Rachman Gallery in the western front of galleries on Chicago Avenue west of Ashland, displayed a collection of drawings the late musician-artist-scenester-singular figure made from 1981-1991, when Willis grew from eighteen to twenty-eight. (He was forty years old when he passed.) Drawing on the collection and archives of architect Paul Young, one of Willis’ earliest supporters and collectors, who met him by chance on the streets of Chinatown, the show captures the vitality of Willis’ intuition as a man with an obsessive eye for the collision of geometry of the man-made city; the giddy but non-ironic absurdism in the lyrics he howled as a post-punk musician are another facet of how the world would not settle in his mind. In his youth, Willis worked as a street artist, carrying a folding chair and sheets of board to capture his vistas or his subways: taking his pens and staring down a skyline or platform or the Dan Ryan as far as you can see. The tumult that prompted Willis’ creativity was stilled, of course, by death, but is damped, too, within genteel surroundings. You can’t contain Wesley: Willis towered. (Ray Pride) Matthew Rachman Gallery, 1659 W. Chicago, 773.245.3182. Through November 17
