Love is carnal. It is always a dance of desire and the energy of union. Godfrey's flirtations, intoxications, conversations and copulations continue a conversation with the sacredness of sex that is largely absent from contemporary art....When we look at Godfrey's lovers, we see the body reclaimed for love. What else is youth and beauty for? It's a dream, but a delightful dream. In the midst of a nightmare of war and bigotry of all kinds, we come across these songs of innocence and experience.

Jeffrey Carr
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Robert Godfrey's work is most often about love and fire, about love afire; where couples are before a landscape, hover over a landscape, or are deep in some wood; and perhaps on Earth, or maybe not. The urgency and rawness of the emotions depicted seem otherworldly, moved to a locale where it would be difficult to perceive of an ordinary existence. He deliberately sets up these inconclusive narratives, filled with questions about the motives and lives of those spinning them--run amok; ceremoniously entwined in some alternative, seminal (cult)ure; or engaged in an embrace or battle for each other,s soul. Faced with nudes embracing, floating, fleeing, or celebrating, the viewer--often directly at the picture plane as if in front of an anthropological museum diorama--feels invited to pry and to wonder if ritual, accident, jealousy, or ecstasy are portrayed: Are these folks amidst our culture or somewhere distant in time or space? His recent sabbatical to Australia reminds us, too, that the sacred Dreamtime at the center of their Aboriginal art has probably always been as important to his work as any western concept of multi-or other-dimensionality.

E Gunn
New York, New York

Robert Godfrey's pictures are powerfully expressive and emerge, in spite of their number on the same theme, not as a manuscript, developing logically and formally, but on the basis of personal experiences, memories, and feelings. For his statement the artist uses mythologies and various metaphors to connect the viewer into the theme through color or shape, to pull him into the picture, where he even subconsciously lives what has happened, and to complete it not only visually but emotionally. This naturally awakens the viewer,s memories, desires, and hopes. Yet each time it almost always forms a reference between the work and the viewer. Accordingly, the work is timeless. It disclaims the value of each work's individual expression and actually gives everyone the possibility to "put together owns own "love story", with more or less individual pieces, similar to a puzzle. This is art that brings the viewer and artist together, that does not permit the viewer to stand apart, but rather allows inclusive possibilities of composition. This is a complete-incomplete object (a contradictory effect and bold attempt), for whose completion the public is necessary.

François Maher Presley
Hamburg, Germany

Robert Godfrey came to his art studies from a blue collar background not calculated to fill him with any special reverence for fine art traditions, yet he has clung throughout his career to figuration much as a modern writer might hang onto traditional storyline, even when free-form prosodists had pronounced it outdated. In fact implied narrative matters more to Godfrey than mimesis, or the pictorial aping of reality. His paintings are less about making old myths new than about making modern myths, about setting up archetypal, convincing artistic situations which resonate, about "whatever it takes to achieve contemporary vitality" (as the artist wrote in American Artist, October 1979, p 117). In his attempt to achieve contemporary vitality, Godfrey offers a provisional synthesis which reflects a progressive attitude in technique and subject matter, but which does not preclude or ignore either tradition or communication. We tamer dog-spirits should heed and even answer the wild call of partially-domesticated wolves like Godfrey , if we wish to understand better how to shed for brief, precious intervals of freedom the common collars that bind us.

James Thompson
Cullowhee, North Carolina

Godfrey's paintings define a place in space where figures fall, dive, dance and lift where their feet are off the ground and groundless. Their bodies make calligraphic gestural lines across the surface, creating a place on the canvas where that which isn't of the body can reside in a state of pure movement. It is a place of blazing light in the dark of night with restless silhouetted figures moving with gestures as big as a leap or fall and as small as a touch or kiss. A concern is shown for the blotch of light or shadow that creates the passing movement of these fictional beings of light and dark escaping, revealing, hiding, emerging thru light, land and woods. He presents all in the marking of the surface, the gestural graffiti of his rhythmic signage, the responsive mark that is the indicator of a speed with which events occur and feelings happen. These are the autobiographies of desire.

George Hildrew
Brooklyn, New York