John Goodyear: Distillation and Wit at Berry Campbell

JOH N G OODY E A R DISTILL ATION AND WIT

B L U E A N D B L A C K K I N E T I C C O N S T R U C T I O N , 19 6 4 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S A N D W O O D, 2 4 X 2 4 X 4 I N .

J O H N G O O D Y E A R D I S T I L L AT I O N A N D W I T S E P T E M B E R 6 – O C T O B E R 6 , 2 01 8 V I E W T H E E N T I R E E X H I B I T I O N AT W W W. B E R R YC A M P B E L L . C O M AL L IMAGES © JOHN GOODYE AR

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n a damp day May of this year I drove out to JOHN GOODYEAR (b. 1930) and his wife, Anne Dixon’s, house and studio barn in Lambertville, New Jersey, to look at two groups of new paintings that comprise the core of the new work featured in this exhibition.

The paintings are small, but they blow up in scale in the mind. One group is comprised of 36 inch square, pictorially complex abstractions that extrapolate and refine away from their sources in Johannes Vermeer: The Guitar Player (1672), Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664), and Girl Interrupted at Her Music (c. 1658) among others. The figures and furniture in each of the Vermeer paintings are essentialized into

SHOE, UMBRELL A, T EL EPHONE, T E ACUP AND SAUCER, 201 1 , A C R Y L I C O N W O O D, 7 2 X 3 9 X 6 I N .

abstract, geometry-inflected shapes that also bear a distinct resemblance to forms that comprise some of the still lifes of the Scuola Metafisica (the Italian painters that include Carlo Carra, Giorgio de Chirico, and early Giorgio Morandi). Goodyear’s geometricization of Vermeer’s figures and interior furnishings turns them into metaphysical instruments. But Goodyear is also interested in the pictorial energy that is created by Vermeer’s cropping, one that extends forms past the frame of the stretched canvas and resists the striking, almost counter-intuitive general repose of the Italian painters nearly three centuries later. In each of the paintings, Goodyear makes the radical and consequential decision to build out and thus make visible Vermeer’s shapes: the elbow in Vermeer’s The Guitar Player (1672) becomes identifiable in Goodyear’s Elbow (2018); the curtain in Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664) in Red Curtain (2018); and the drop of the protagonist’s shawl in Interruption (2018).

Goodyear was motivated by his Vermeer extrapolations to push further into “pure” abstraction in a subsequent group of six smaller canvases that intersect a solid color geometric form on a white field, with the geometric form also breaking the edge of the frame to hang fire out beyond the perimeter of the rectangle. Each canvas is named after the color of its own particular geometric shape: Red, On and Off (2018) for the painting with the red square, Yellow, On and Off (2018) for the yellow triangle, and so on. Are the forms entering or leaving the canvas? It’s not really important because in this compacted scale (20 x 20 inches, not including protrusions) the viewer is taking in the whole of the painted object, an image/object fusion on a scale that recalls the influence of icons on early abstraction while going further in breaking the bounds of painting’s default rectangle. Goodyear’s paintings are miniature compared to Ellsworth Kelly’s larger two-color paintings of intersecting geometric forms, and I think this speaks to Goodyear’s different concerns. Though he’s made larger work, Goodyear’s paintings mostly reside in a workshop scale, like that of a puppeteer or tinkerer. I have the image of the artist smiling to himself at a workbench as he figures out how to attach the extension of the smaller geometric shape to the rectangular stretcher bars and then how to stretch and fold the canvas cleanly across and into the additional nooks and crannies engendered by the shape’s breaking of the rectangular frame. Even going back to the work of his that was included in the exhibition, The Responsive Eye (1965), at the Museum of Modern Art, the viewer can feel its scale relation to their embodied eye rather than the architectural “field” of the room.

The completion of this group of six two-color abstract paintings excited Goodyear enough to finish two more small-but-big-in-themind paintings, Octagon (2018) and Black Stick (2018). Octagon is 22 ½ x 22 ½ inches and centers a grey octagon on white canvas ground with the sides bursting out of the square frame to create a much more complicated, if still stable and symmetrical form. And for the first time the non-white area is larger than the white areas, which are now little star point triangles. In Black Stick, which is 23 x 22½ inches, the eponymous form is a heavy, even band in the upper right, leaning at a slightly more horizontal angle than the diagonal sides of the octagon, notched inward towards interior of the painting. I don’t say “downward” because, true to the artist’s longstanding mischievous sense of play, he imagines that a viewer might rotate his abstract paintings to their own whim. As with the preceding group of paintings there is a deep tissue connection to the historical iconographies embedded in painting, especially in Octagon, which resonates with Byzantine geometric decoration and also the famous octagon of Henri Matisse’s Rose Marble Table (1917). Goodyear intends these paintings to be abstract, but a painting’s image history is a kind of ghost in the machine that he invites in. The “black stick” on the other hand, resists becoming a mnemonic echo chamber and remains a coolly precise image. The work’s outer edge mimics the angle of the octagon, turning the upper right corner of the painting into another white star point triangle.

E L B O W , 201 7, A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S , 3 9 ¾ X 3 6 I N .

In contrast with the intimate scale on display through much of this exhibition, Goodyear’s most recent painting, Triangulating Square (2018), is one of largest he’s made in a while and, like Black Stick, severely abstract. Here, a narrow black right triangle (originally intended to be grey) seems to be plunged into the six-foot square white space like Excalibur into the Stone. The right angle “base” of the triangle sticks out from the top of the painting, including a small portion of the hypotenuse, while the “point” ends downward on the lower left side, somewhat to right of the corner. This painting is closest in scale to Kelly’s, but by directing our attention to the painting’s interior it seems to point inward rather than slide outward, as Kelly so often intends.

As a context and foil for his new paintings this exhibition includes fine examples from the range of Goodyear’s painting concerns throughout his exemplary career as an equally rigorous and playful abstract painter who has never lost the recollection of the figure. Notice how all these paintings do something in real space, projecting (optically, or physically, or both) a plane beyond the given surface of a “normative” canvas or panel. Goodyear’s newest paintings are witty and distilled extensions (pun intended) of his mischievous restlessness when faced with the rectangular containment of the painting’s surface. Distillation and wit are, in fact, the hallmarks of his continuing achievement over a long and brilliant career.

Stephen Westfall

PURPLE, ON AND O F F , 201 8 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S O V E R W O O D, 23 ½ X 20 I N .

R E D, O N A N D O F F , 201 8 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S O V E R W O O D, 2 2 X 20 I N .

GREEN, ON AND OFF, 201 8 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S O V E R W O O D, 20 X 2 1 I N .

Y E L L O W, O N A N D O F F , 201 8 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S O V E R W O O D, 23 ¾ X 23 I N .

R E D C U R TA I N , 201 8 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S , 3 8 ¾ X 3 6 I N .

OR ANGE, ON AND O F F, 201 8 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S O V E R W O O D, 23 ½ X 20 I N .

BLUE, ON AND OFF, 201 8 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S O V E R W O O D, 20 X 2 1 ¾ I N .

C O V E R : T R I A N G U L AT I N G T H E S QUA R E , 201 8 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S O V E R W O O D, 9 2 X 7 2 I N .

C H I M PA N Z E E P O W E R , 19 9 5 , A C R Y L I C O N C A N VA S A N D W O O D, 14 X 14 I N .

J O H N G O O D Y E A R D I S T I L L AT I O N A N D W I T SEPTEMBER 6–OCTOBER 6, 2018 V I E W T H E E N T I R E E X H I B I T I O N AT W W W. B E R R YC A M P B E L L . C O M 5 3 0 W E S T 2 4 T H S T R E E T N E W Y O R K , N Y 1 0 01 1 I N FO @ BER RYC AM P BEL L .COM MODERN AND CONTEMPOR ARY ART

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