Selected Reviews

Tempera Paintings by Andrew Young

SBG Miami, April 14, 1994

- David M. Rohn 

A seductive show of paintings by Andrew Young opened Saturday at the Bianca Lanza Gallery.  The works are in the egg tempera technique which was used by Italian painters of the 15th century and which the artist learned in Siena, Italy, while studying there on a fellowship.  Their smooth surfaces and mysterious light effects are executed on panels mounted on simple, but refined cherry-wood frames.  The result is a rich visual treat where many fine traditional painterly values meld with a few contemporary liberties.  It all stands up well enough to bring to mind contemporary masters like Gerhard Richter, or Ross Rleckner.  And like those two artists, this one could probably survive hanging next to an old master too.

It has to be said first that the old-looking amber palette of most of the works is one of the “easy” reasons these paintings have such a substantial quality.  But clearly it is also the evident mastery of the egg tempera medium which is at least partly responsible for this.  So even if the paintings look a little old and crackled under their smooth egg shell varnished surfaces, we are pretty quickly convinced that there is much more here than just a patina.  There is something about this medium that freezes the gestures behind the brushstroke, that suggests subtly-shimmering flower petals, or candle flames, or softly reflected surfaces, even the blacks seem luminous.  And the resulting images are trance-like.​
                                 Inner Steps, 1994
                        Egg tempera on wood panel,
                                     15 x 12.5 in.
The subject matter seems to be vases of flowers, wall paper-framed still life’s:  objectively non-descript motifs.  But we look at these paintings the way we might, if we were gazing at something without really looking at it—Not looking at it because we are lost in some profound reverie. So beyond the aspects of a technique and the mastery of it, these paintings are images that function in a unique way.  As subject matter, the compositions that suggest vases of flowers or wall paper aren’t particularly amazing.  But the brushstrokes that form these vague still-life’s are presented as a series of gestures that can be appreciated individually, each stroke a bolt of light, as vital and the hand that struck them.

The symmetrical flower arrangements like “Air and Sea” and “Crowding Spirits” are the least interesting compositions to this reviewer.  Instead, the more ambiguous compositions that suggest spaces such as “Inner Steps” and “Musical House” seemed most successful because they suggested a subject as mysterious as the strokes and colors and light effects that form them.
                           Crowding Spirits, 1994
                      Egg tempera on wood panel,
                               34 x 23.5 in.
There is a third category of composition that has an over-all motif like wallpaper, as already mentioned.  Some of these are near-black with light accents and silvery discs.  And others near-white with dark accents and near-black ‘holes.’  “Climb the Ravines” is an example of the latter, with a particular beautiful ‘sprig’ of botanical brushstrokes in an asymmetrical composition that has a wonderfully spontaneous and liberated feeling.  “Toys Already” is a dark one with silvery platelets rising through a scratchy, even scary, mediaeval-looking arabesque.  It’s a pleasure to see such ‘serious’ work that uses such ‘decorative’ devices.  These are visual devices that have been neglected recently and which can be used forcefully now because of that neglect.
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It was mentioned that the artist had first studied biology and that his forms and motifs may have come from microscopic images of life.  If that’s the case, then he must have been profoundly moved by the mysteries of life’s force as he viewed its cell structure—because these images have a distinctly transcendental feeling.  Because they are so balanced, they seem to have been painted in some kind of spiritual state of recollective quiet.  They are as elegant and beautiful as nature itself; and the creator seems to have used the discipline of the tempera technique to induce a rhythmically painted response that is in concert with nature.