Anodyne
Friday, June 08, 2007
 

CJB returns, after long absence, to the pages of the Georgia Straight.

"[Robert] Young’s art imaginatively reconstructs experience as a kind of allegorical collage, in which realistically painted or drawn objects compete for the viewer’s attention with images pilfered from art history. His paintings are nominally still lifes that depict living-room interiors, flights of stairs, scenes half glimpsed through urban windows, and fruit and flowers. Their ostensible realism is repeatedly disrupted by visual quotations from the work of other artists, and by jarring shifts in medium. Oil is juxtaposed with chalky gouache, watercolour, coloured pencil, and silvery graphite.

Young’s compositions are further complicated by witty trompe-l’oeil effects, in which drawn or painted objects are tacked to the picture by carefully drawn pushpins or pieces of painted tape, à la William Harnett or Jasper Johns.

Young doesn’t distinguish, as do most people, between non-art objects and phenomena encountered firsthand (honeysuckle, shadows, a living-room carpet) and art he admires (a Suzuki Harunobu woodblock print, a Tuscan column). This is a radical idea in a culture given to enforcing separation between things, one eager to classify and sort more and more finely, forcing experience’s subjective richness into the narrow confines of genres or 'schools'."

[Image credit: Robert Young, Jeremiah, 2006]


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