Joe Goode
Flat Screen Nature
July 12–August 29, 2014
Kohn Gallery
1227 N. Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Kohn Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by southern California-based Light/Space and Conceptual artist Joe Goode. The new series, titled Flat Screen Nature, is the culmination of the brilliant ideas and bold experiments Goode has investigated over the course of his 50-year career. Beginning with his “Milk Bottle” series (early 1960s), his art practice questions the impermeability of the surface of the painting. The artist toys with the boundaries of the literal and the abstract while looking through the visible world, dissecting matter until it dissolves into immensely beautiful fields of color. Goode expanded on this theme of “looking through” with his “Torn Sky” series of the early to mid-1970s by literally slashing layers of serene cloudscapes with razors and knives. Here the artist’s violent action creates depth in these placid, meditative surfaces that often reveal other painted canvases below the surface, or even the structure of the canvas itself. Continuing with this theme in later series such as Nighttime, the slashed surfaces often become so deep as to reveal the wall behind them.
Drawing inspiration from his own history and art practice, Flat Screen Nature is informed by the powerful odes to nature and expression found in his earlier series, as well as his “Cloud” (mid- to late 1960s), “Ocean” (late 1980s), and “Ozone” series (early to mid-1990s). Like these historical, canonized works, Flat Screen Nature toys with perception and audience engagement. While atmospheric and sublime, this body of work is simultaneously hyperaware of its own structure and materiality. In contrast to the “Torn Sky” and “Nighttime” series, Goode slashes and claws at the edges of Flat Screen Nature, revealing the fiberglass “canvas” and giving way to the appearance of the painting emerging from the wall beneath. In leaving everything but the edges intact, the containment of this destructive energy signifies a return in Goode’s practice: Instead of seeing through the painting to the wall beneath, one is confronted with an object coming forward to engage with the viewer’s space (a call back to the artist’s iconic “Milk Bottle” paintings). While his work continues to explore the process of “creation, destruction, creation” (Goode), and the atmospheric influence of the California sky and ocean, the psychology of painterly effects is underscored and brought to the foreground.