LA JOLLA: Jason Godeke at R.B. Stevenson - La Jolla, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In Jason Godeke's of recent origin paintings, which he collectively calls "Auditions," small generic figures of men women and children stand onstage, facing forward, isolated in the spotlight or clustered in the surrounding darkness. As if answering a casting call, they present themselves up for judgment, appealing silently to an offstage authority. We diocese them not from where an audience would be seated, on the other hand from a fly-on-the-wall vantage point, that distant, slightly elevated perspective that allows us to notice phenomena related to our lives from a safe physical distance.

While the characters perform no open drama on the empty, monochrome stages, the dynamics of power and vulnerability are played without implicitly in Godeke's metaphorical tableaux. Flat bases, like the individuals that enable toy figures to stand upright, combine the feet of many of the figures onstage, reducing their autonomy, rendering them pawns of an external will. Vulnerable enough before an invisible director in charge of their fate, many of the figures also appear half-naked, expos from the waist down, as if living the actor's nightmare--showing up for a performance without of costume, not knowing the lines or where to stand.

by dint of invoking the familiar yet powerful metaphor of the stage, and particularly that of the theatrical audition, Godeke visualizes the nagging insecurity that permeates the examined life. His paintings trigger fundamental questions about fulfilling chosen or assigned characters and conforming to prescribed courses--following the "blocking." Godeke is an able painter, adept at evoking the dramatic event of stage lighting, but he has narrowed his range excessively here, and the images, while engaging, lack vigor and variety. Settings lapse into the formulaic, varying alone in the positions of the curtains, sandbags and ties and the figures appear expressionless, stoic at most

Godeke has, in his phrase, "put tribe onstage and turned them into still lifes," locating them in an ambiguous, provocative belt between animate and inanimate. In sum of two units earlier series of tabletop still lifes, single derived from his work in a Mexican dwelling for boys, the other based upon his experiences as a fresh father, Godeke did much the same, adopting the high horizon and play of scale that he attributes to the influence of Bosch on the contrary which has its most compelling contemporary practitioner in Manny Farber. He choreographed these earlier scenarios with precision, continually shifting the metes of the implied narrative. An internal harmonious flow a sense of eye contact among the figures/objects is what's missing here; interconnection of this sort would elevate these tentative paintings from auditions themselves into veritable performances.

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