Selected Reviews

Timeless Images

Newsline Annual, January 1994
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- Aasim Akhtar  ​
Timeless Images​

The National College of arts in Lahore recently hosted an art exhibition which was both ambitious and illuminating.  It opened the gates of its art gallery to show the work of a visiting American artist from Chicago, Andrew Young.  Young does not fit into any of the currently fashionable styles or stances in art.  His work comprises egg tempera and water colour paintings; Young’s sensitive paintings and carefully crafted objects function on several levels, focusing on the historical reciprocity of art and design. 


In their artistic sweep and scale, Young’s images are timeless.  They are defined by slow, creaseless mark of motion within the framework of space.  Shapes and forms, as they emerge, calmly articulate their occupancy of space in his paintings.  The deceptive calm of these images holds a tempestuous dream within; botanical forms and flower species draw upon the tension between descriptive rendering and abstract variation.
                                  Furnishing, 1992
                Egg tempera on wood panel, 36 x 18 in.
                                 Crystal Arms VII, 1992
                              Monotype, 25.5 x 15.5 in.

​​The tempera paintings on show give one the impression of candle-lit interiors where light and colour become subtly shifting, palpable presences. Empty of people and filled with a reticent yet sensuous light, Young’s still lifes seem emblematic of the artist’s isolation. In nearly all the still lifes on display, the artist chooses flowers as a subject—but the artist’s identification with universal forces transcends the use of flowers as a symbol, transfiguring both painting and perceived nature in the process. The robust wooden surfaces in peeling detail and the fragile flower—an affirmation of the significance of human sexuality—the transparent and the opaque, are woven together into intimations of a lingering nostalgia for both the physical and the metaphysical. The best example in this case is the painting in tempera titled, “Furnishing,” where the artist’s sexual metaphors underpin the choreography of his burnt sienna and amber hues.
A romantic flourish accentuates the vibrancy of colour laid down in thin washes.  Young’s palette lends itself to the brooding force of this theme.  The artist often alternates the complexion of his paintings by infusing rich yet different palettes to create a dialogue between “thema” and “chroma”—such as in “Nothing Yet Stirred,” where glimpses of gold-brown lurk beneath echoes of sunburst orange.  The work enriches itself through an encounter with the traditional resources of the genre and the medium.  Fragments of precursor painting align themselves like treasured quotations that have gradually been shaped into one’s own idiosyncracies of syntax and diction in Young’s work.

Young’s Old Master manner of painting—layering translucent glazes—and his dramatic lighting effects are reminiscent of much religious painting.  The artist discovers the links between the mundane and the sublime through rites of passage—a concept evident in apertures serving as passages in some paintings.  The formal possibilities of the medium are no longer a central focus; the interior monologue, which clearly is purely autobiographical, now addresses itself to ideas conveyed in the past, so that the fading motifs of human existence are partially restored.
                 Boundaries of the Hearth II, 1992
                  Monotype print, 19.5 x 15.5 in.