Selected Reviews
Andrew Young at David Beitzel
Art in America, December 1991
- Eileen Myles
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David Beitzel Gallery, New York
Thanks to the Rotary Club that gave him an art scholarship, Andrew Young stopped studying microbiology at Berkeley and went off to Siena instead. Inspired by the techniques of the Sienese painters of the early Renaissance, he returned to this country and found a man in Berkeley who taught him both fresco and egg tempera. The result was seen in this concise show of nine egg tempera paintings on panel—strange yet stylish-looking works of varying sizes. Relatively unemotional, they evoke such worthy themes at Time and Memory without quite getting involved with either. Young’s work is clearly about the tradition-laden medium he has chosen to use and its application today. |
Costume and Carriage, 1991
Egg tempera on wood panel, 45 x 34 in. |
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The works range from nearly abstract to the clearly representational. One painting, Pale Feast, includes a simple arrangement of flowers on a shelf, a candle, a small arch. Delineated in mostly “interior” colors—browns and dirty golds—the painting’s reality is orderly yet feverish; it’s as if you were lying in your mother’s bed watching the furniture and the sheets go wild as you head got hotter and hotter. Tigress, a small (23 by 23 7/8 inches) diptych, looks like a microscopic close up of something or other. Its surface is as marked by erosion as a Martian landscape. Most of the panel is filled by a blue-black ball; an empty white ring hovers above it. One can easily get caught up in the antique feeling of Young’s materials, and here the ball and ring remind me of Joseph Cornell. A pale border at the top of the painting contributes to a box effect. |
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The most elaborate of Young’s painting and the largest (45 by 34 inches), Costume and Carriage, might be read as a bowl of flowers on a table against a wall. But the imagery is not clear. A mostly mustard façade is bordered by a decorative notched coffee table trim that pokes into a central trough. Large wings of darkness fill the lower third of the painting around a ring of dirty white paint that seems to be part of an upward procession of shapes—three or four white roses of paint that head off towards the right. Behind the roses, dead center on the panel, are several purposeful-looking hazes of black tempera with tendrils that stream upward. Meanwhile, in the mustardy areas, “sores” of red are coming up through the yellow. One thinks of a wall in India that has been painted over many times; the implication is that Time itself is doing its own paint job, but of course Young has actually constructed that effect. |
Pale Feast, 1991
Egg tempera on wood panel, 15.5 x 13 in. |