Jack Youngerman will show his recent wood relief paintings in the second exhibition devoted to this new medium for the artist. Youngerman’s career has extended over fifty years, with many museum and gallery exhibitions, beginning in Paris in the 1940s. This will be his 10th show at the Washburn Gallery. There will be eleven reliefs ranging in scale from 3 feet to over 8 feet each carved and richly painted or stained in lush, vibrant colors. Youngerman uses several woods, including birch and pine which he laminates, carves, and then applies brilliant reds, yellows, deep blues, and oranges to the various surfaces of the reliefs.
In Dore Ashton’s introduction to the catalogue, the writer describes Youngerman’s relief paintings as follows:
At first glance Youngerman’s wall reliefs are emphatic, or even emblematic. But as the eye lingers, they transform themselves. Beneath the artist’s incisive hand a host of subtleties appear, such as the barely visible crossing of grains in his trim wood shapes, or the sliding, almost imperceptibly, of one plane beneath another in his laminated interior forms. But surely what is most memorable is Youngerman’s insistence that color speaks. In his largest reliefs it emblazons itself with such force that it seems the very subject of the artist’s imagination.
Further, Ashton writes:
In his approach, Youngerman remains a painter. Although the contours of his shapes and their shadows are cut out rather than painted, his reductions to plane surfaces are in the modern tradition of the great painterly abstractionists from Mondrian to Matisse—those, in short, who abstracted from experience its summary expression.
A brochure will be published with five color reproductions and the complete introduction by Dore Ashton below.
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At first glance Youngerman’s wall reliefs are emphatic, or even emblematic. But as the eye lingers, they transform themselves. Beneath the artist’s incisive hand a host of subtleties appear, such as the barely visible crossing of grains in his trim wood shapes, or the sliding, almost imperceptibly, of one plane beneath another in his laminated interior forms. But surely what is most memorable is Youngerman’s insistence that color speaks. In his largest reliefs it emblazons itself with such force that it seems the very subject of the artist’s imagination.
As simple and commanding as the total work appears, it gains its force from the oldest memories of meanings enclosed in ornament. Ornament always bespeaks its origin in symbol. It is an instinctive register of long forgotten origins and meanings. One can imagine Youngerman’s sun-infused color in the large reliefs to be carved, layer upon layer, from faint memories of Zeus’s thunderbolts, or the wingbeats of the spiraling eagle, or other myths of the tribe many times abstracted and distilled. Organic or geometric, they are shaped metaphors that move out from an imaginary frame unfurling with the energy of the Irish Book of Kells.
Not that Youngerman wields that parallel language overtly. If he chisels a curvilinear form resembling a banderole in a medieval manuscript or a Persian miniature, it is also, in its final contour, many other things. Youngerman’s semaphoric alphabet generates associations with roots, lotus buds, feathered bodies, pinwheels, arrows, suns and stars. Other associations are instigated by allusions to specific aesthetic traditions, such as the planar massing of color in Japanese kimonos and prints, or the curving symbolism in South Sea Island Shields, or the instant geometries in American Indian artifacts.
What Youngerman has done, either by gouging firm lines in pinewood, or cutting shapes and layering in plywood, is to subsume the painter’s numerous means in a final abstraction that expresses the supreme emotional value, hue, and saturation, of color itself. Tawny orange, water blue, or gleaming black are exultantly named and endowed with meaning.
In his approach Youngerman remains a painter. Although the contours of his shape and their shadows are cut out rather than painted, his reductions to plane surfaces are in the modern tradition of the great painterly abstractionists from Mondrian to Matisse—those, in short, who abstracted from experience its summary expression. The will to cut directly to the fundamental aesthetic emotion has always been there. Matisse spoke of “cutting straight into color” when he began his experiments with papiers coupés. He said, in Jazz, that it “reminded him of the direct carving of the sculptor.”
Youngerman is incisive in his methods, and decisive in his conviction that shaped color can tell all that he needs to tell. It is a kind of taming of the elements that, in its final resplendent form, requires no words to achieve expression.
- DORE ASHTON