Selected Reviews
Andrew Young
New Art Examiner, January 1991
- Mitchell Stevens
Betsy Rosenfield Gallery, Chicago
Centuries before television and the death of God, Italian painters perfected the art of transforming egg yolks and pigment into magical pictures. These craftspeople made sacred images by strictly adhering to the grammar of Christian iconography, rendering opulent, highly readable visual texts--pregnant with supernatural meaning--which created a feeling of spiritual connectedness between viewers and their Divine. Andrew Young’s paintings do a similar job. Borrowing the difficult medium of early panel painters, Young makes meditative and disarmingly beautiful pictures which mimic those altar pieces of a less secular past. Young’s semi-representational images, hazy depictions of flowers, birds, and other simple still life objects, reflect his knowledge of the Western art historical canon: a statue of a nude male is rendered a la Apollo Belvedere, an arch-and-column construction recalls Fra Angelico, vases of flowers harken to seventeenth century still lives. These distant aesthetic memories make their comebacks alongside crisply etched geometric shapes and indecipherable splotches of color. Like schools of mismatched symbolic fish, these disparate forms appear to swim in weird harmony on the liquid surface of Young’s panels. |
Anemone, 1990
Egg tempera on wood panel, 31.5 x 23.5 in. |
Liar, 1990
Egg tempera on wood panel, 13.5 x 11.5 in |
The paintings portend no specific symbolic content yet bear witness to their maker’s adherence to a meticulous pictorial logic. Each image is held together by its own rigid system of balance and line. Young positions his objects precisely, often placing them at the intersections of hair’s-width, ruler-straight incisions on the surface of the panels. Geometric forms are made with the help of a straightedge and compass. Swaths of deceptively free-form color always adhere to the taut—but elusive—compositional forms. Egg tempera is an unlikely player in these disciplined visual games. Sticky, fast-drying, of variant consistency and generally uncooperative, its watery personality threatens irreverent dribbles and glitches at every move of the brush. Young placates the paint by letting it have its little tantrums within the strict architectural confines of his compositions. Viewers are never quite sure whether the rough spots are ordained or deplored. Under the artist’s hand, even sins of the wayward appear to conform to a grand design. When coupled with the labored balance of his pictorial order, the holy patina of Young’s medium makes the material relationship between object and viewer seem almost mystical: we stare at the pictures and think we’d like to believe. |