Guy Goodwin “Grotto Relief”
Brennan & Griffin
This event has ended.
Interview with Guy Goodwin and David Reed on the occasion of Guy Goodwin: Grotto Relief
David Reed: When I was here last week I kept thinking about a statement of yours from a previous show. You should read it out loud.
Guy Goodwin: “My work is so damn task oriented, there is practically no aesthetic pleasure in it, all I do is one job after another, the only time I feel any pleasure is when the painting is finished.”
DR: Is that still true?
GG: Still true, (laughs) maybe more so.
DR: Wow.
GG: And on top of that, the type of paint that I use now is a mixture of a couple things and takes about 30 hours to dry. As it dries, the color gets lighter and lighter. So when I finish doing an area I have no idea if it works, what it looks like, nothing. So I am in this kind of soup and struggling with the pressure I have to put on the painting. I don’t know what it looks like until the next day. So I leave while I have no idea. That’s part of the torture. (laughs)
DR: This seems to contradict the paintings. They imply that they’re going to deliver a lot of pleasure. They invite you in, promise to enclose you: a plush booth in which to rest.
GG: A place to be.
DR: …in exaggerated comfort - very desirable.
GG: The paintings do that, yet there is something amiss. The promise is temporary. After all, they are made of cardboard.
DR: Yes, cardboard and hard, one knows it because of the staple holes - not comfortable, I guess, to sit on. So there’s just an illusion of comfort.
GG: The only comfort for me is the resolution between the pressure and the breathing that the painting does. I think of geology. That’s the kind of pressure I have to apply to push these pieces together. But then in the end, if the painting is successful, they breathe. The paintings give you a kind of release that is counteractive to this ambiguous place that you’re in. The breathing is very important to me. The painting is totally coming at you and it’s kind of caving in at the same time.
DR: What you say about breathing reminds me of that statement by Joseph Beuys about Palermo that we have spoken about so often: He said that he liked Palermo’s work because it was “porous”.
GG: Funny you say that. I think that’s the reason why I started emphasizing these holes, in other words the holes are about more than the surface. The surface in traditional modern work is always there. The whole thing is the surface. I was emphasizing that surface with the staple gun, punching holes in it. Then when I decided to make the holes larger as well, that made the surface ambiguous.
DR: If I remember, the interviewer presses Beuys on what he means by “porous” and Joseph says breathing in and breathing out. In your paintings one sees the surface and also sees through those holes to something behind. And when I look at the paintings, I also feel that there is something behind my back as well. These paintings aren’t just something to look at. They are all around you.
GG: Per Kirkeby wrote somewhere that painters are either looking out of the cave or looking into it. (laughs)
DR: You are looking into it?
GG: When I was younger, possibly I was looking out. The older I get, the more I’m looking into the cave. There’s no doubt. That’s where I feel I belong.
DR: There’s another way that your work suggests pleasure: through color. The color is extreme and promises a lot. It’s oversaturated and artificial, but not beautiful.
(Guy laughs)
It’s like the color used in advertising for fast food restaurants. “You’re going to like this” – the color says, and of course you know that you’re not going to be satisfied, but you go in anyway. We spoke once about the chicken restaurant in “Breaking Bad”. That color scheme relates to your paintings.
GG: Color is new for me. I used to be more of a tonal painter. In the past ten years, color has become possible. It’s the color you see everywhere. All I can say is that I really try to refine. I spend a lot of time mixing and matching and I know when the colors are right. I make these little swatches and try to figure out what it is that makes me want to keep one and not the other. When it works there is some kind of strange street-like harmony. That’s the only way I could put it - like the way a billboard would work. Another quality that is really important to me is the way the color sucks the light in.
DR: That’s interesting
GG: So it’s a real combination. It’s advertising-like color, but I’m refining it. There’s a little more harmony in the way the colors work together, echoing or reverberating.
DR: Not just emblematic color, but something else.
GG: …something quivering or slightly off. My orange won’t be like the orange of, I don’t know… Dunkin Donuts or something. I hope I give it that different edge. That’s definitely a big thing for me.
DR: So it’s not a branded color. It’s a more particular color
GG: In other words every color has two or three colors in it, always. It’s kind of muted in one way or another.
DR: So what comes across as blatant color when you first see it, namable color, is not. That makes the color uneasy and you want to look more to identify what it is.
GG: I hope so.
DR: Where did this grotto image come from that you started putting in the titles? How did that occur? I think a grotto offers the same promise of security and pleasure.
GG: I was working on a painting last year, and about half way through, I felt like, well, where am I? And I thought: “I’m in a grotto. That’s where I am.”
DR: You don’t just mean your studio felt like a grotto, you mean that your emotional state was one of being in a grotto?
GG: Recently I’ve been really thinking about a place for some kind of contemplation or restoration, and to get away from things. So to me, “grotto”, seems to be a word for a place that I dream of being in.
DR: I think of a grotto as being in the dark. Do you think of it that way?
GG: No, I just think of it as more artificially lit.
DR: Ah, very interesting
GG: Same way a cave would work. That’s the idea. I think what I like about the term is the fact that it is not something that is naturally formed. I like it that a grotto is artificial. That seems very important to me. It’s my construct. It’s not a real place.
DR: So a grotto for you is a place of healing?
GG: Restorativeness.
DR: I keep thinking about one grotto I know. It’s where Actaeon stumbles on Diana. Because he sees her naked, she turns him into a stag and his hunting dogs chase and kill him. Poor man, he was just trying to get out of the sun, rest a little. It was an accident.
GG: Donald Trump was waiting inside the cave.
DR: That’s what I’m trying to get at! In these paintings, the moods seem so timely and current. Somehow, they relate to the political situation in which we find ourselves.
GG: It’s impossible not be there because of the shock that’s going on in the world. Rather than some kind of ideal, my paintings are, in my eyes, very impure. A lot of my work has been coming to terms with that, this kind of impurity about all these weird mixtures. The paintings are more like the way my life is, and the way I see life anyway. Issues. Does that make sense?
DR: Yes it does. We’re looking for comfort and resolution and that’s what gets us into trouble. It’s the dynamic in your paintings.
GG: Not only that, there is always for sure a way out from these paintings. They are not that hard and fast. You’re not trapped. You have to deal with it but you can get out. I love that.
Guy Goodwin (b. 1940) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Goodwin received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois in 1965. Notable exhibitions include: Looking Back / The Ninth White Columns Annual - Selected by Cleopatra’s, White Columns, New York, NY (2015), High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967 - 1975, curated by Katy Siegel with David Reed advising (2006-07, traveling), Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (1987), Bykert Gallery, New York, NY (1974), Whitney Annual Exhibition of American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1972). This is his fourth exhibition with the gallery.
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Schedule
from May 13, 2017 to June 18, 2017