View of Brent Godfrey’s “Identities” at ‘A’ Gallery in Salt Lake City, with his painting “Handstand” in the foreground.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with painting from photographs. Even artists who never, ever work from them will tell you they have no quarrel with painters who do so. Photography was invented in the 19th century by painters seeking to shorten the arduous path that leads from three-dimensional reality through sketches and studies to a canvas copy. Why ignore that? Brent Godfrey declares he’s taken thousands of photographs, many of which led to various of his hundreds of paintings, including among them a portion of the 60 new works currently filling not just the customary, central chamber at “A” Gallery, but pretty much the entire north half of the building. Others came from family snapshots dating back to his early years. Knowing that, the sophisticated viewer will see ample evidence of the connection.

That said, Brent Godfrey is adamant that a painting is never a photograph. For him—and, he would argue, for any real artist—it’s not an instant captured from life and arbitrarily presented exactly as the camera happened to capture it. As evidence, he points to a remarkably compelling painting that only took him a few years—so much for the original plan to shorten the work—titled “Adjustment.” This vintage image shows a woman standing in a parking lot, apparently at the beach, wearing a stylish coat with a tied belt, clearly shot by an amateur whose shadow, falling across her legs, has been meticulously copied by the painter.

Brent Godfrey, “Adjustment”

The title, which could stand in for the work required to elevate every image, here refers specifically to the way her hands touch her sunglasses. Everyone knows that faces and hands tend to grab all the attention, and her hands touching her face pretty much render the rest of the picture moot—or mute. While it’s impossible to reconstruct the months spent struggling with it, he seems to have eventually found a painterly equivalent for the blur of her hands in the photo, while her glasses took dramatic precedence over her face. It’s a large painting of a single subject and not a lot of detail, but it ends up with an irresistible quality.

One way of viewing the figures here is to take stock of the various ways Godfrey seems almost to attack some of the faces. The boy in “Handstand” is upside down, a position known to defeat our dedicated skills at reading expressions, and which tames his antic grin. Grab a copy of the gallery’s mailer and turn it over to see how effective this is. In “Stolen Identity,” wherein the actually-most-popular Leonardo hovers between the utter ruin—with only 20% of the original paint present (and none of that on Christ’s face)—that restorers work with, and the pristine remade images created for our delectation, the face of Jesus looks like some supercharged environmental activist just landed a sincere pot of mushroom soup squarely between his eyes; yet for the first time the chaos that da Vinci meant as response to a spoken revelation fully functions visually.

If Godfrey can be hard on his human subjects, he’s a paragon of solicitude with animals. Consider “Secrets Dancing,” in which the fully revealed bear goggles askance as if in this alternate universe it can see what only the painting can reveal: the literal “defacement” of the young lady in the rose print dress and cowboy boots. Although the title refers to the artist’s statement that he’s always “painting intimacy,” this is one of those times when a mystery is several times more rewarding than a simple explanation. In the background of all his works, meanwhile, lurks his insistence that we humans are, after all, animals too, even if we require such periodic reminders. The religious, we might add, are not alone in believing that every living thing possesses a soul.

Brent Godfrey, “Secrets Dancing”

Brent Godfrey, “Stolen Identity”

Anyone who has visited “A” Gallery over the years will have learned that Godfrey is as invested in abstraction as representation. In this showcase, however—his first in three years—it becomes apparent further that his abstracts are as varied and individually specific as his animals or his narratives. In part this is due to his feeling that they do a more complete job of capturing time and its passing. So it is that “Ten Years In a Life” invokes the day-to-day reality of life much as a calendar might, yet without actually representing anything so arbitrary as a repetitious identity. Perhaps the most completely abstract results occur when he finds himself done with a painting, yet in possession of a whole palette of unused paint. Then he may just arrange those exact colors on a blank canvas for their own sake, perhaps in a form like “Thread Bearing,” where ropey horizontal lines of thick paint completely cover the large canvas: the act of consummation by a lover of pure color.

One of the sad things I learned while talking to Brent Godfrey is that some in his audience believe, on account of the way he has distorted elements in his painting in search of a deeper truth, that he cannot, for instance, paint faces or hands. Among the sixty works here there is ample proof that not only can he limn them accurately, but he can impart an encyclopedia of feeling to them. Similarly, it might be put forward that he is too conventional to truly matter in today’s art world. Yet, and again it is necessary only to look in order to see, he is one of the most innovative, visionary artists we have. Thanks to the good sense of Allen and Alan Fine Art, his work is available year-round to confirm these admittedly personal assertions. But right now, three years of work by a prolific artist wait to be seen and appreciated. I recommend making time for more than one visit.

Three abstract works by Brent Godfrey.

Brent Godfrey: Identities, ‘A’ Gallery, Salt Lake City, through May 30.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.