Martos After Dark - Guy Goodwin: Holy Gaskets

Martos After Dark is pleased to present Guy Goodwin: Holey Gaskets, including a survey of new works by the artist.

In the Martos After Dark gallery, a project space adjunct to Martos Gallery, eight uniformly-sized rectangular works line the walls. They surround the viewer, the borders of the works halting a rhythmic procession of amorphous shapes. Low reliefs made of cardboard layers, glue emulsions, acrylic paint, and staples, the painting-like objects protrude from their enclosures. Sulfuric colors barrage through the compositions. At 83 years old, Guy Goodwin has arrived at a unique process.

Goodwin started painting in New York in 1964, becoming part of a wave of artists creating process based works. The use of unconventional materials was secondary to the way in which they would do so, as the gesture of letting the world seep into art offered radical and liberating possibilities to break from preordained material and conceptual limitations. An analogous externalization of the civil rights movements of the time. The loosely defined group was monumentalized in the seminal exhibition High Times, Hard Times: Painting in New York from 1967 - 1975 at the National Academy Museum, including Goodwin among peers like Yayoi Kusama, Blinky Palermo, Richard Tuttle, Dan Christensen, Harmony Hammond, Ree Morton, Lee Lozano, Elizabeth Murray, and many others. After decades of exploration, Goodwin began incorporating cardboard into the painterly language he had developed by isolating shapes, gestures, and discrete forms. He turned inwards, working inside the confines of the rectangle, and outwards, with sculptural sensibility. Cardboard presented itself as an emancipatory medium, dispossessed from the weight of oil painting and its history.

Goodwin's recent work demonstrates his continued interest in formalism. Composed of layers of cardboard on which he applies acrylic paint, followed by layers of a homemade concoction of pigment and glue to form a hardening, and drilling holes through the resulting mounds so the pieces might “breathe”. It’s a slow process, in which Goodwin intuits the limits. The result is bulging, patchwork-like shapes with jagged edges. Freeform and instinctive, like the improvisations of jazz. Blacks, reds, and deep purples color the compositions, with apparitions of chrome yellows, oranges and blues scattered across a few of the works. His idiosyncratic, unnaturally saturated palette is reminiscent of children’s toys, fast food restaurants, and psychedelic paraphernalia. The works prove generous in their associations, from Americana to Pop Art to AbEx, and Goodwin himself is frank in the sociopolitical underpinnings behind them. Of influences, he recalls his upbringing in Jim Crow’s Alabama. “One of the things I grew up with in Birmingham was a lot of violence” the artist says “so I was resolving these issues psychologically. I think I created objects that were almost like shields that I could almost get behind, even though it could be very uncomfortable at times."