The humanism of Pete Wheeler’s paintings expresses a deliberate social conscience that has an internationalist perception.

Wheeler also wants “the subjects to be things that everybody has an idea about.” (1)

Wheeler utilises an urban, expressionistic approach to his work. There is a graphic compositional sense of juxtaposed graffiti markings or stencilling while elsewhere in the same work some figurative elements are treated with fullest representational clarity while others seem diffused, hidden behind ephemera and layered details.

“There is a political aspect to his work. Human figures can often be seen as either victims or oppressors in a modern world that owes a lot of its ambience to George Orwell’s 1984.” 2

The eclecticism of these paintings begins with historical fact – the Night of the Long Knives in Nazi Germany - but also reaches across to quote from the Bible and music. The recurrent motifs of the patterned hooded figure; the straining, menacing, violence of the black dog; the memento mori of the skull and the inevitability of death dominate; sitting in flat colour backgrounds. To these he has now added an entwined red rose and this new element proffers hope amongst despair.

We see love in a homogenised, deconstructed, violent world.

1. Artzone, Summer 2003/04, p. 26.
2. Ibid, p.29.