Jason Young's deliberately beautiful paintings manage to acknowledge contemporary art's enduring affection for the artificial and to present a serious attempt at attaining the sublime. There's no easy way of mixing the two goals, but Young, 27, blends high and low art and impulse through an inspired use of materials. His superimposed transparent sheets of embossed acrylic resin evoke both the ethereal and the sleazy.
His gloriously complicated patterning suggests many things -- animal skins especially, but also gestural drips in the classic Abstract-Expressionist manner, as well as mud cracks and cells seen under a microscope. Young's embossing technique enables him to mimic all sorts of effects, for the resin can pick up the pattern of almost any sort of material before it sets.
Sometimes the top layer's pattern closely echoes an earlier layer without exactly duplicating it. This extremely close registration makes for great visual intricacy. At the same time, Young is willing to vary his imagery, with the result that his layers might show drips, python skin, foliage, etc. In one painting (all 11 pieces in the show were untitled) the top layer is a dull-green drip pattern, and underneath it is a lizard-skin stencil. The sensuousness of the juxtaposition is engrossing -- at least, if one's eye isn't blinded by the resin's reflective surface. His results invite speculation as to how he achieves them, but after a time the viewer notices just how cold, inert and glassy the resin is, and the paintings' artificiality comes to the fore.
As Young wrote in an exhibition statement, "The obvious imitation of nature in acrylic creates tension." The transparent layering of different visual effects often seems arbitrary, so that the pattern is, in the artist's words, "something approaching beauty while falling just short of kitsch." Young wants his audience to ricochet between feeling distanced and being seduced by his imagery. It's clear that he is as interested in artifice as in transcendence. But that's the way it should be in a time when most artists are extremely self-conscious about the pursuit of the sublime. At this moment, he is a young, ambitious artist whose use of the manmade to create something beautiful makes his art knowing in a very contemporary way. It will be interesting to see where he goes next, since he has already produced such highly finished art.
