Another one of my favorite artists — I recently acquired an early charcoal drawing.
“Joe Goode has long made pictures designed to be looked through, not at. His work is deadpan, and seemingly innocuous. The LA Times critic William Wilson, in 1971, called it ‘neutrality-style art’. Perhaps this mildness is why he never got quite as much attention as his childhood friend Ed Ruscha, who also does deadpan but who usually cuts his neutrality with non-sequiturs (often verbal) that are arresting and funny. Goode only trades in the very lightest of humorous touches – a milk bottle painted mauve, for instance, placed on a shelf in front of a mauve monochrome canvas. That was his early Milk Bottle series, (1961-2), still amongst his best-known work.
Charcoal drawings from his X-ray series (1976) depict sheets of tattered white paper apparently taped against a dark background. Goode’s method was to tape one piece of ripped paper to another clean sheet, and to strafe it with charcoal powder. When he removed the taped-on piece, a perfect x-ray-like impression remained. The drawings offset the gritty evidence of their own dilapidation with transcendent illusionism. They are perfect, even as they are ruined.”
Quoted from Jonathan Griffin for Art Review 7/14