Art Review

Bright Spots: At a time when many artists are making paintings that look better in magazines than they do in person, it’s refreshing to see a painter whose elusive abstractions cannot be captured by a photograph. One of the best things about Joe Goode’s new works at L.A. Louver Gallery is that they’re meant to be lived with, fully embedded in the rhythms and rituals of daily home life.

In the main gallery, eight modestly scaled oils-on-canvas resemble enlarged versions of the blind spots that linger on your eyeballs after you stop looking at a bright source of light. Like the sun, Goode’s blindingly white, yellow, orange and pink paintings are best seen peripherally--out of the corner of your eye, as you focus your attention elsewhere.

To encourage this type of viewing, he has paired his quietly beautiful paintings with life-size spiral stairways made of handsomely finished wood by artist Roy Thurston. Some of the staircases include only a few steps, which lead from the floor to the wall on which the paintings hang.

The largest work pairs the smallest canvas with a full flight of stairs. Emerging from the wall only to curve back into it, these graceful stairs recall grandly theatrical ascensions, but make literal access very difficult. By playing with perspective, the combination of large stairs and small painting makes you feel as if your body were smaller and farther away from the canvas than it actually is.

Even more extreme in their separation of the physical space and the untouchable realm opened by paintings are three canvases bracketed by a single stair above their top edges and one or two steps at ground level. Together, these fragmented staircases form sweeping curves that draw your eyes and mind behind the walls on which the canvases hang.

In the smaller side gallery, Goode outlines the night version of his exhibition. Three lunar works on paper flank a large canvas, across whose dark surface opaque depths play off of mercurial reflections with ghostly subtlety.

As a group, his elusive works ground themselves in the world only to slip out of its grip. Like Goode’s “milk bottle paintings” and staircase sculptures, begun in the 1960s, his new juxtapositions of objects and images split the difference between the world and its representation without hedging their bets.

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* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., (310) 822-4955, through July 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.