Selected Reviews
Andrew Young Blends Perfection with Frailty
The Boston Globe, February 20, 1997
- Cate McQuaid
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Andrew Young poses spiritual riddles about perfection and frailty in his show of egg tempera paintings at Alpha Gallery.
The Chicago artist traces the gist of his work back to visits to Siena, Italy, where he studied the egg tempera paintings by early Renaissance Sienese artists, and to Pakistan, where he studied Islamic culture and art. The Sienese placed biblical narratives on architectural stages in their paintings. Islamic art is based on complex patterns, and said to represent the unity of the inner and outer selves. Young frames the soft center of his paintings―fluid, lilylike white flowers that float over the surface of his canvases like jellyfish through the ocean―in interlocking patterns that reference the solidity of architecture. Remarkably, the flowers seem organically connected to the aging stars, squares, and tiles they hover over-grace born of concrete. We view them head on, gazing into their pistils and stamen. Their buttery white petals recall cleaving cells. In “Language Will Follow,” the background resembles precisely laid geometric tiling, cut in diamonds of blue, brown, and ocher and describing stars and snaking pathways that circle the scuffed, chipping pattern of a sunray of petals in a raised impression on this wall. (Don’t forget: This is no sculpture, no wall, but a painting executed expertly with a recalcitrant material). |
Language Will Follow, 1997
Egg tempera on wood panel, 44 x 34 in. |
The flowers quiver in the foreground. In the middle ground, jet black bars reference arches, doorways, and halls, but contain the worn sunray pattern within their lines. Dropping down the center, two of these bars burst out of context and become the veins and leaves adjoined to the luminous white blossoms.
All of Young’s paintings have the glossy sheen of tempera, similar to egg white brushed onto baking bread. His dramatic reds and oranges entice the eye. Even as he strives for a kind of perfection with his complex patterns, he lets the paint crack and age; the flowers seem almost correspondent with the flaws of their background. We may never become perfect, these paintings say, but it is in our softness and our frailty that we will become whole.
All of Young’s paintings have the glossy sheen of tempera, similar to egg white brushed onto baking bread. His dramatic reds and oranges entice the eye. Even as he strives for a kind of perfection with his complex patterns, he lets the paint crack and age; the flowers seem almost correspondent with the flaws of their background. We may never become perfect, these paintings say, but it is in our softness and our frailty that we will become whole.