Born in 1928, Ralph Goings is a pioneering American Photorealist painter, and Christie’s is delighted to present three scenes of extraordinary delicacy. Rendered in microscopic detail, the surfaces of Mustard, Salt and Cup and Spoon dazzle and glint in the painted sunlight. These are small moments of quiet beauty, the poetics of everyday life: the creamy porcelain of a diner mug, tiny crystalline salt forms, a crisp shadow. Goings painted predominantly photographs and often compiled multiple shots of the same scene to produce a world of intoxicating verisimilitude. His art set out to rival photography, and yet his aim is fundamentally different. As the artist explained, ‘by using this machine, this camera thing, as an extension of seeing, I could maybe see the world differently.’ (R. Goings quoted in ‘Oral history interview with Ralph Goings, 2009 Sept. 10-11’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). By representing a truth more exacting that anything the eye can see, Goings transformed the ordinary into the exceptional.

These three works present an earnest understanding of American vernacular culture and are, accordingly, bathed in a nostalgia that hopes for an optimistic, boundless future. Photorealism developed in the United States during the late 1960s, when a number of young artists began to paint their everyday lives in mesmerising detail as a response to both the phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism and widespread use of photography. In a nod to the lack of emotion in Pop art, Photorealist compositions too desire a dispassionate perspective. Although Photorealism is interested in figuration, these paintings are often devoid of figures. Instead, Photorealists focus on mercurial reflections and glossy surfaces, and Goings was invested in the substance of paint on canvas: ‘I just love the idea of an elegantly painted surface. I mean, my paintings are not - they don't have a lot of paint on them. But there is enough paint on there that if you look closely, you get the feel of the paint itself. And even if the tooth of the canvas is showing through in the paint, that adds to it. It makes - the painting is an object. It is a thing. It is not just a representation. It is something that was built’ ((R. Goings quoted in ‘Oral history interview with Ralph Goings, 2009 Sept. 10-11’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).
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