Ambition and dedication are the hallmarks of painter Trevor Young's work. This forthcoming exhibition, "Seeing in the Dark", the artist's fourth at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, highlights the artist's dexterity, vision and skill. Deftly balancing natural and artificial lighting, applying his considerable knowledge of surface glazing and paint layering, transforming ordinary nature and mundane architectural edifices into multilayered scrims empty or nearly empty of human life are several stratums of Young's creative practice.
As comfortable in small scale works (8 x 10 inches, 12 inches square) of which there are dozens in this exhibition, as in sizable ones such as the exhibition's largest, "Crude Refined", Young allows the works to feed off of one another, working and reworking several at once and, at the same time utilizing his own photographs, illustrations from artist monographs and plein aire observation in a relentless search for compelling images. The artist, not unexpectedly, explores night and twilight in many of these paintings. The visual depth achieved by multiple paint and glazing applications is as lustrous as dark colored gemstones and as seductive.
The artist's extensive knowledge of contemporary and historic painters informs the conversation he has with his work. Surely the empty lit billboards, roadside signs and gas stations channel Ed Ruscha while treading a far more painterly path. The lonely lights of two cars, one coming, one driving away, in "Solo Commute", may owe something to groundbreaking artists like James Abbott McNeill Whistler, many of whose "Nocturnes" of the 1870s are on exhibit at the Freer Museum. Whistler, in turn, attributed their creation to the work of artists such as Rembrandt.
Audacious work like "Pyramid" and "Halo" will be shown beside more sublime ones like "Morning Vape", "Sutty Night" and "Golden Vapor". Familiar landmarks such as Dulles Airport and Union Station appear beside nameless gas stations, all night stores, parking garages and gas pumps. These binaries, antithetical settings reveal a mature artist as comfortable with exploration as he is with refining the practice of his craft, willing to return to subjects once cast aside and finding new life in recycled themes.
Whistler aptly summed up a painter's duality with this quote: "Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful-as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony. That Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all."
Trevor Young creates his own, contemporary harmony, his own beauty.
Written by Christopher Addison, Addison/Ripley Fine Art