Santa Monica

Joe Goode makes an extraordinary comeback with eight large, lush paintings that may be the best work of his considerable if understated career. The artist emerged hereabouts in the ‘60s, painting one-color canvases that rested on the floor, each with a matching milk bottle standing like a lonely sentinel before it. They suggested the cozy anonymity of suburban tract houses with their curious private poetics.

Goode tended to be bracketed with fellow Oklahoman Ed Ruscha as a kind of gentle Pop artist. He went on to make trees, staircases, drawings of unmade beds and paintings of skies with torn photographs blowing in the wind. All played with the border between pure art and illusion. Then he turned out some fairly silly pictures that were blasted with shotguns and his work went into a slump.

It comes roaring quietly back in present pictures. Each is painted in what appears to be a solid cobalt blue. The hue has long been associated with the pioneer French conceptual artist Yves Klein, but from now on we are liable to call it “Goode Blue.” It’s a wonderful magic color with its curious capacity to range from the density of a midnight sky to the limpid transparency of jewel-like stained glass.

Goode sublimates its properties in canvases up to 10 or 12 feet high. They are the purest paintings we’ve seen by the artist, suggesting something from the more metaphysical branch of the Abstract Expressionists--somewhere between Rothko and Reinhardt. There is no imagery, but by varying the density and direction of his roughly symmetrical strokes Goode manages to suggest night skies contemplated through the lacy foliage of silhouetted trees. In a couple of pictures the hue is tilted green and the result is like visiting one of Monet’s lily ponds at 2 in the morning.

Achingly romantic, the pictures are as mellow and mature as the realization that when you die you just get folded back into the enchantment of that throbbing mysterious azure.

In these cynical times it is purely heartening to see an artist like Goode--and Ed Moses late last year--still pursing the muse of profundity and catching her. (James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., to Feb. 4.)