I’ve heard some publications (Hyperallergic) don’t let friends write about friends’ paintings. I’ve been friends with Rachel Youens for many years. A painting of hers hangs in my living room. If that’s disqualifying, don’t read more….
What fascinated me at first sight of her paintings was the flipping of the positive and negative space and her strange symmetries. The canvases were horizontal double squares really—or nearly so. (Van Gogh used canvases of this dimension in his last series of paintings.)
For subject matter she arranged a large table with bread, bread sticks, slices, pasta and whatnot. Bread is important to humans, no doubt but this bread was not edible (anymore), and the paintings are about bread and not about bread; the table was a laboratory of shapes and shadow: a study of light and space.
The bread has gradually left the table—perhaps it was eaten by mice, I don’t know. The table continues though—it has become festooned with drapes, and cluttered with vases, branches of leaves and other objects. A still life but the way she paints it often suggesting a larger interior space or even a landscape.
In her current show, the paintings are not all horizontal and the mood is lighter, more colorful and more…trying to think of the word…metamorphic maybe. I was considering “surreal” but that’s not quite right, it is more of a visual thing. You are looking at an object and it becomes something else. I was looking at the precariously balanced fork in the foreground and thinking that in all these paintings precarious balance has become part of her subject matter, when I noticed that the stick had become a jaunty fellow leaning on a lamp post, possibly with a crooked erection– that just occurred to me—the post became a mast, the fork became a rudder, the fabric became the sea and I could go on and describe the orgy in the hot tub but won’t.
I’ll just mention that the table slides up to become the wall and at some point, the whole thing collapses back into a still life and starts to move again. It’s pleasurable—also disconcerting.
Actually, there is still bread; a couple of ciabattas on the right side of View. Are there a couple of baby slippers in the pile too? This painting becomes a seascape although that reading is contradicted by the drapes and green festoon, the vases, a pinecone and a stretcher bar that leans on the table. Nevertheless the feeling is very strong that you are looking at a sea past the rock, and the sand in the foreground looks wet like a tidal pool. Once that beach became firmly established—in my mind—the blue vase on the left started walking toward the red vase on the left—two women friends—and the stick started carrying the pinecone to the other side. I remembered a wonderful day on Block Island on a beach by the cliffs and my friends and I were the only ones there.
I have not asked Youens about her intentions (yet); but it might be that the intense concentration she is bringing to making the painting and the long slow looking that they require of the viewer creates the ambiguity—recognizing some objects and not others is what make the paintings start to mutate in the way I have described.
This is how Ovid begins Metamorphoses:
“My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into
shapes of a different kind. You heavenly powers, since you
were responsible for those changes, as for all else, look favorably
on my attempts, and spin an unbroken thread of verse, from the
earliest beginnings of the world, down to my own times. “*
This is my favorite book. I hate change but somehow Metamorphoses fascinates and even comforts me—it frees me from the rigidity of my own mind.
Goddess and Deer is more explicit in including figures, the woman in the background, the deer perched on a yellow vase, but even here, my first impression was that the deer was a male dancer flinging his arms to the left—do you see that too?
Each object seems to be painted individually with its own color combination—this separates the objects and almost forces the viewer to look at them one by one. What holds them together is the underpainting; in Goddess… it is the color of a clay flowerpot. I also find myself bouncing between the deer and the flower and the yellow vase and the blue cloth. The yellow and the blue act as complements both connecting and repelling each other, and creating space between them.
Morandi, Yes! The same intense focus, insular subject matter, gorgeous paint handling, the subtle muted calibration of colors; not one area of the canvas is undeliberated. I once read a brilliant psychological study of Morandi’s paintings (and I have never been able to find it again.) The author psychoanalyzed the positions of the vases as social groups, one standing alone, another jammed into the middle or hidden from view. I suppose that guy would have a field day with Youens’ work—Love to see him try it!
Youens also reminds me of the painter Anne Harvey** in the way that she activates the entire space—my eyes are compelled and lured into a dance of moving from the details to the whole and back again.
Is it just my fevered imagination that makes that pinecone into a hopeful erect penis? And the top of the whisk broom into an elbow—the orange thing into a head with one seductive eye open?
I’ve just returned from South Africa where I visited The Cradle of Humankind. Two billion years ago, an asteroid struck an inland sea filled with microbes and somehow kickstarted life on earth. It is a wonderful place, a beautiful landscape, crystalline air: I can see how tempting it would be to evolve there. There was a picture of the early life forms in the museum that looked very much like Taylor’s Untitled Diptych.
Here are a myriad of forms that can become anything. The marks and swipes and accidental interactions of earth, air, oil and water swirl around clumping and dissolving into multiple images.
It is a true diptych, not just a continuation of one painting or two disconnected panels. The two sides are all made of the same protean substance–on the right they are coalescing into larger forms that might be in conversation with each other. I’m reminded of a Chinese painting of a group of sages in a sunlit courtyard. On the left, a darker more subterranean fluid, the creation of blood.
–CNQ
*Ovid Metamorphoses translation by Mary Innes, 1955 read here.
This is a link to the Cradle of Humankind
This is one of the Youens’ earlier paintings composed mostly of bread:
This is what I have written about Anne Harvey
