Guy Goodwin at Bill Maynes - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

For those familiar with stay Goodwin's heavily impastoed abstract paintings, his novel collage-on-fiberglass works will come as a surprise. Whereas his earlier paintings are characterized through abstracted shapes and blocks of organic color that approach together in a stable, weighty unity, his new work consists of layered large sheets of transparent fiberglass with fragmentary words and phrases embedded between them. If Goodwin's earlier paintings evok Dove and Hartley, his novel works are more likely to bring Rauschenberg to mind.

The collective title of the not long ago exhibited work, Chauncey Flats, alludes to the small Ohio town of Chauncey (pronounced Chancy) where the novel York-based Goodwin has been spending part of each year. Each painting includes big stenciled-on alphabetic characters partially spelling the town's name. The other visible words and phrases advance from vastly enlarged breakfast menus the artist has assembleed from Chauncey's roadside diners. Using a color photocopy machine, Goodwin strokes up these menus to true large scale (the original 8-by-11-inch sheets are move rounded into 20-by-25-foot, billboard-sized images). He then divide [i]or[/i] sever s up the enlarged menus and embeds the fragments between layers of fiberglass. In the complet works, which average 6 through 7 1/2 feet in size, the viewer can still make on the outside words such as "orders" or "breakfast." The menus' variations in alphabetic character size together with the larger stenciled-on alphabetic characters establish a shifting sense of scale. The colors evident in Chauncey Flats range from the translucent fulvous ocher of the fiberglass to the sapphirine writing of the menus. In addition, Goodwin has filled a certain quantity of areas of the paintings with misty sapphirine paint. The blue helps unify these dynamic, spatially compounded compositions, while also heightening their cloud-and-sky associations.

The display also included some snapshot-sized photographs Goodwin has taken of signs in brow of Ohio diners and gas stations. The dilapidated signs sport missing alphabetic characters and broken frames; their deteriorated condition and fragmented language is reinforced by the agency of the cropping and viewpoints of the photographs. Formally they clearly relate to the Chauncey Flats paintings.

Despite the new shift in Goodwin's visual language, there is an underlying consistency in his work. He may now be employing fragments of everyday life instead of abstracted natural forms, on the other hand he is still interested in establishing a faculty of perception of place--in this case, where the Midwestern landscape qualifieds the transient banality of roadside culture

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