WITH THEIR POETICS OF COLOUR AND LINE, ARC AND ANGULARITY, THIS EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS ON CANVAS BY JOSEPH GOODY NURTURES SUBJECTIVITIES WITHOUT SECOND-GUESSING THEM, CREATING NOVEL SPACES WHERE CONCEPTUAL REFLECTION AND VISUAL PLEASURE COLLIDE. DISPLAYED BOTH ONLINE AND IN THE PHYSICAL GALLERY SPACE.
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Goody has cited the sculptor Eduardo Chillida’s dictum that ‘the limit is the true protagonist of space’, as well as Chillida’s reflections on the ambiguities cultivated by the repetition of near-identical forms, as prompts to his own investigations. The interplay of straight and curved lines, suggesting connections between the organic and the mechanical, are key here: meaning coagulates in the spaces of the non-linear, yet the certainty of the flat edge – including that of the canvas itself – acts as a structuring force with and against which Goody’s forms consciously interact.
Working in conjunction with, rather than from drawing, his intuitive use of colour is guided by a similar thinking, moving towards the sense of a particular emotional key or pitch in each painting. Navigating the works on display, these pitches cluster into chords of feeling whose precise tonality is determined in dialogue with the viewer and their passage through the space – in both its physical and virtual forms.
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Having referenced writers including Franz Kafka and Philip Larkin in previous solo exhibitions, this new selection of work draws partly on Goody’s reading of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. It’s not a case of simply illustrating the poetry, however: instead, Goody’s imagery emerges from a precise engagement with literary form. The works respond to an interest in a material reduction, akin to that found in the poem and the short story, that is also an opening out onto wider prospects; a kind of compression or hardening into specificity that nonetheless retains and fosters core ambiguities.
Bound up with this is a sense of piling up or accumulation of form and colour that feels both chaotic and closely controlled. Goody’s precise use of thick and thin layers of paint, carefully weighted, create an effect of forms seeming to fluctuate and shift between foreground and background. A play of sharp and blurred lines lends added force to the work’s tactile sensibility, where planes of flat colour are at one and the same time fragments of some wider, unknowable whole.
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The geometric forms and broad kinetic curves of Joseph Goody’s painted works cultivate a tension between organic, manual means of representation and the appearance of something machine-like or systematic. Just as the layers of paint, applied with a luxuriant relish for pigment and texture, appear to potentially result from accident or coincidence, the interrelation of large blocks of colour and space seems to point towards some underlying interdependency at work beneath the surface. Goody’s interest in the authenticity of paint as a medium leads him to developing this interplay, where the submerged presence of momentum, posture and form are enlisted to allow paint’s emotive characteristics to displace the urge towards figurative representation.Joseph Goody (lives and works in London) graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2011 and won the Neville Burston Award for Painting. He later studied at the Prince’s Drawing School (now the Royal Drawing School) where he won The Patrons Club Prize in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions include 'How Distant', Sid Motion Gallery, London, (2020) and 'The Sudden Walk', Cob Gallery, London (2018); and group shows '9 Artists', 143 Bellenden Rd, London (2018); 'NEW WORK PART I: FORM', Cob Gallery, London (2018); 'London Art Fair', Cavaliero Finn, London (2017); 'Joseph Goody', Cob Gallery at Blacks Soho, London (2017); and 'Quixotry', Stoke Newington, London (2016).
