As we move from one millennium to another, the art of Wilbur M. Reeling takes us into the art of language and wrestles with the question of meaning for a new age. The language he deals with is not the symbolic verbal image of spoken or written language, but the fine art symbol of visual language. For that reason, any verbal introduction to his art is at best difficult, at worst impossible. In this doorway beyond modernism, beyond post-modernism and all the deconstructivism that has marked the end of the former age, his visual words construct a new communication. He places before us an entry into the complexities of mind and spirit, sense and nonsense, logic, illogic, intuition and sometimes almost brute confrontation. At that entryway, he gives us no direction signs save the almost enigmatic titles he has appended to his works, titles that seem to emerge from the works themselves, with the same complexity as the art work. We, the viewers, are set to the task of discovering meaning, probing the depths of his expression, to discover him, and, perhaps more importantly, to discover ourselves.

His works are not declarations. At the end of the twentieth century, we have frankly grown weary of artists who insist upon declaring in emphatic terms their view of the world. Instead, Wilbur M. Reeling initiates a conversation with the viewer, and that is the highest aspiration of the artist. His work is perennial because it does not have a definitive conclusion. Unlike the traditional story, with a beginning, middle and end, his work has a beginning, a middle, but not an end.

His art begins out of his varied experiences, from art school student, combat cinematographer, photographer, husband and father. His view of innocence in the gentle simplicity of his daughter Honor, and of crumbled innocence in his own failed health and marriage, his struggles for artistic recognition and an understanding of such varied encounters as with Paul Klee, Jackson Pollack and Vasily Kandinsky have all added to the formation of his language. But from the beginning, everything is new. His abstract-imagery is used as a tool to forge an understanding of the moments of his life, and of life itself, agony and delight, questions with only temporary answers, answers with only temporary meanings. The premise is both simple and incredibly complex: the stuff of life itself.

The middle is the conversation. It is, as he himself says, "an interactive experience between each viewer and the artist, one that pushes the viewers' perceptions to look within themselves, in a new, never explored direction." And what a conversation! The tangle of forms creates nonetheless an astounding unity in which the mind discovers its own need for order and understanding of the vagaries of the changing millennia. His insightful use of color, both brilliant and subtle, of line, rhythm and abstraction create a profound sense of vision for the mind to encounter its own need for a value and world discovery. And his simple, unaffected sense of design opens for us a view of the world as it is, not as he or we would wish it to be but rather a world full of delight and pain, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, fools and friends, reliability and errancy. We are reminded of the old Latin maxim: Caveat erro, let the wanderer beware. Once you enter into this conversation with Wilbur M. Reeling, you will discover truth, and a world that you have not before known.

Jacques Maritain, that insistent French philosopher, says that beauty is that in which the mind discovers itself. In Wilbur M. Reeling's art, we discover ourselves, and no higher accolade can be given any artist.

I have said that this art has a beginning, a middle but no end. Every time the viewer returns to the art work, the conversation continues, with new meanings, new depths, new answers. That is the enduring nature of his work. I am happy to welcome you to this selection of Wilbur M. Reeling's view of our labyrinthine world and the wondrous complexity of a Millennial Shift.