Jules de Goede

A Hint of Colour

and an accompanying show including works by:

John Carter, Julia Farrer, Albert Irvin, Peter Sedgley and Marc Vaux

20 June - 2 August 2008
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Untitled, 2007, 160 x 255cm

When Jules de Goede died last year the art world lost someone who encapsulated what it was to work in London during the latter half of the twentieth century. His obituaries in the Guardian and The Independent made much of his quiet presence on the London art scene. In his early days in London he was a teacher and an artist. He was somebody who then retired from teaching and spent the rest of his life painting in his studio which he continued until almost his last days.

Untitled, 132 x 157cm

His course was solitary, sometimes almost solipsistic. His investigation and work were borne out of a time but at the same time almost entirely unrelated to fashion. As a talented youth growing up in Holland he mastered with ease the more traditional conservative, figurative styles of the turn of the 20th century. But his intellectual and emotional drive placed him in an area of abstraction that has roots in the political, polemical works of Malevich and El Lissitsky and the theosophical mysticism of his countryman Piet Mondrian. Once there he never felt the need to move outside of this rich seam; his travels to Australia and around the world somehow only embedding them more deeply.

Still Life 2, 1996, 71 x 71cm

Within this realm his life was a daily process of creating and breaking rules - a methodology where he could work out the most structured sketches on squared paper and then introduce a personal intervention such as a sweeping wash across the canvas to make the painting complete. Even after the most carefully thought out plan was executed onto canvas he could still be moving panels of colour, changing colours, sometimes years later; tweaking paintings until the work came to his order.

Untitled, 96.5 x 140.5cm

The dynamic of a structured world in which human intervention altered the course of events was both a personal and artistic policy. As a child he remembered growing up in a village next to one of the key bridges of the Second World War. The bridge was recaptured by American forces as part of the liberation of Europe. For his family this meant liberation but then the need to reformulate a life in the wake of this struggle. Later when his family moved to Australia he exhibited avant-garde sculpture alongside other artists who were showing traditional figurative painting. The press response to this was front page with the suggestion that he was something of a wild thing. Following his move to London, though, this youthful excess settled into a more mature engagement with his own work; his teaching tempering his zeal but providing him with a core focus.

Movement, 1996, 44 x 52cm

His work veered from hard-core, calculated constructivism to playful op art. Cutting into the canvas and creating sculptural elements within the canvas was a planned and crafted technique. (In his earlier work this incision would often be offset by wooden batons appliquéd to the surface). His view was that this incision and the crafting of troughs, bowls and pipes made the picture plane float in a middle space, neither surface nor background, thus creating a uniquely abstract space. These cuts into the canvas are unlike Fontana’s razor slits which seem to expose a metaphysical void behind the picture and more like attempts to root the work as a concrete albeit abstract presence.

Untitled, 127 x 112cm

His legacy when he died was to leave a studio full of paintings that encapsulated his career. In the latter stages of his life he worked on paintings as series, sometimes up to ten or more paintings all based around a core structure reminiscent of a composer’s variations on a theme. He also worked on a series of large magisterial paintings that are imposingly formal but, with their pivotal accents of colour, rather intimate. This exhibition will I hope give some sense of De Goede’s work and encourage further scrutiny of this significant and thus far underrated artist.

Angus Broadbent - May 2008

Jules de Goede attended the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten en
Kunstnijverheid in Arnhem, Holland from 1953 - 55 and then the Eindhoven School of Art in Eindhoven, Holland from 1955 - 56. He then relocated to Australia and attended the Julian Ashton School of Art and the Desoderious Orban School of Art in Sydney and completed his studies in Canberra in 1960 at the Canberra School of Art. De Goede lived and worked in London until his death in 2007 at the age of 70.