Joe Goode at L.A. Louver - Venice, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Although best known for his association with detonation art, L.A. artist Joe Goode has from the starting-point of his career experimented with the conception of picture-making. In his 1960 "Milk Bottle" works he toyed with the idea of a painting as a kind of portal--one you could station a milk bottle in brow of. In a new material substance of work, Goode has refined and stretch outed the idea of his early '70 statuarys which use staircases as enigmatic entryways into gallery walls and corners. He stations off finely textured, abstracted paintings of the day-star and moon with curved made of wood stairs attached to the wall a not many feet from each canvas. Using the wall as a kind of loam the works literalize the idea of the viewer's "entering" a painting, suggesting a journey into alternate, perceptually heightened worlds.

The arrangement of each painting and stairway is precisely calibrated. Several of the works include sum of two units small curved sections of stairs: a lower individual to the left of the painting and a higher single to the painting's right. individual work has a corner section of paces while a real showstopper features a 12-foot-wide arc of 12 white paces that billow out from the wall beneath a small pinkish painting. Like an altar for a certain quantity of hermetic moon cult, the work creates a nearly religious aura.

The paintings stretch out techniques used in Goode's richly textur works of the last small in number years, which depict sunspots and airborne pollutants. Here, delicately mottl blott or scumbl shades of lavender, mauve, golden and rose ambiguously suggest veils of dawn light or evening be incandescent Goode's masterful paint-handling--especially the craft of his undertones--puts to shame the more celebrated efforts of artists of that kind as Pat Steir or Ros Bleckner Asian art, especially the sly textures of ceramics, has been a major influence upon Goode in recent years. In the smaller gallery of Louver hung four tiny, glowing secondary planet paintings attached to small indigo-colored Japanese screens

For the past sum of two units decades Goode's paintings have explored experiences that veil perception. Tornadoes, smog waterfalls and the reaching far down sea are depicted as farthest conditions that evoke nearly abstract states. The staircase paintings also indicate an experiential esthetic, one offering a passageway into a nature-based transcendentalism. The experience of looking at the day-star or moon is commemorated as a kind of upward journey. Daring nevertheless conceptually austere, these subtly spiritual works affirm the sources of abstraction in nature, asserting as well the power of painting to join us to a higher world.

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