Joe Goode
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach
ARTnews, May 1997

Joe Goode is a sensational painter, in the fullest sense of the word. He is also an inspired choice for the Orange County Museum of Art's inaugural exhibition in its renovated galleries, a survey of more than forty paintings which spans the quarter century from the artist's 1980-81 "Environmental Impact Series" - monochrome canvases and diptychs whose surfaces are ripped by shotgun blasts - to his current work.

A peer of the California light/space artists who emerged in the early 1960s, Goode has shared their preoccupation with the perceptual process, all the while maintaining a highly individual path through a time when painting was virtually banned from the canons of serious art. Eschewing the grand gesture, Goode works with tough-minded austerity to open up the two-dimensional surface for exploration, using often imposing scale - as well as pigment and the process of its application - to engage the viewer in a continuing dialog on the nature of perceptual experience. We are impressed less by his genuine virtuosity and authority as a painter than by the discretion with which he uses these qualities, in canvases whose eloquence is amplified by discipline.

Goode has also mined the productive vein that lies on the tenuous border between abstraction and representation. Inspired by such natural phenomena as fire and ocean, waterfalls and tornadoes, his paintings tap into their essential, elemental energy as much as their appearance. The restless, multi-hued surfaces of the huge Ocean Blue Series, for example, evoke images of water, but more importantly draw us into the experience of its vast hidden forces; and his tornadoes suck us into their black, tempestuous vortices.

Since 1992, from the Ozone Series into the current Sunspot Series, the violence evoked by nature's extremes has taken a darker turn in exploring real and present threats to the existence of our planet from both within and without. Without political rhetoric other than their titles, the seared, blistered, heavily scumbled surfaces of these paintings are starkly disturbing reminders that we toy with nature at our risk.