Joe Goode at Texas Gallery, Houston - Surface Paintings

Joe Goode: Surface Paintings
Texas Gallery, Houston
April 24 - May 29, 2004

Texas Gallery presents the work of JOE GOODE whose first show with the gallery was in 1973. This exhibition of new work is titled Surface Paintings - a group of paintings that are purely abstract in nature with layers of patterns of built up brushstrokes and the resulting radiating color. The artist states that he took all of the information that he had accumulated from his work over the last few years and put it into each painting in this series. The overall feel is of shifting atmosphere..like a fog..that obscures and then reveals. Inspiration for the artist has come both from observed nature and from the observed physicality of paint itself…so the works are both associative and self reflective... mysterious and practical at once.

Like many Californian artists, such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, who choose to use other means to affect a pure visual experience for the viewer, Joe Goode wants to create a similar visible reality but by sticking to the medium of paint. He also recognizes that the perception of light is tied up with nature. From an essay about Joe Goode’s work by Michael Duncan, titled Must See to Appreciate: “Turning the picture making experience in a pervasively more cerebral key, Joe Goode espouses the environmental, visual effects of nature painting without any traces of precise narratives... (recreating) natural ambiences. These artificially induced states of mind result from the masterful manipulation of an inherently illusionistic process of painting. Joe Goode’s work analytically employs the color and textural properties of paint to emulate the most elemental levels of visual reality. In their insistence and repetitions, various series can be seen to equate basic color tones with natural elements.” More recently Joe Goode has been informed by Asian influences such as the modern Gutai group of painters who similarly desired to depict in their work the ineffable qualities of nature.

TEXAS GALLERY
2012 Peden, Houston, TX 77019
www.texgal.com