Courtesy: the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.

John Young, Naïve and Sentimental XXXI, 2023. Oil on Belgian linen, 190 x 150cm. Courtesy: the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.ARC ONE Gallery presents Spectrumfigures, Naturescapes, from the influential contemporary artist John Young. This exhibition features Young’s major investigations of abstract paintings, a reassessment of technology’s modification of bodily skills, accompanied by a poetic reflection of The History Projects.

Where is Young taking us? Into the light? Into nature? Into a removable hard-drive with 10,000 jpegs, ready to merge? This is how his majestic abstract paintings are made. For this exhibition, Young harvested thousands of images from rainbows to landscapes, which he combined in layered composites. The transformation makes something beautiful out of something overwhelming. All we see is the resonating blur left in their wake.

This is digital art, albeit meticulously hand-painted. Oil painting is an ancient and dense process that Young uses to conceal and control the presence of technology. Young is a critic of technocracy and seeks to “step over” it if only “to say farewell to its impoverished promises”. To this end, the spirit of our age is filtered through the traditions of our ancestors. Young takes us through this melancholy process because, “I miss Cézanne”, he writes, “and Shi Tao too”. Young is taking us back to art history then, back to artists who had hands that changed our eyes.

The stakes are high for Young, as they are for us all. These paintings, “look through the lens of techne, but hopefully in order to bid it adieu, and thereby atone”.

Young’s work is an offering to the future, a statement about today, through the medium of yesterday’s expressive promise. Walter Benjamin wrote about a storm “blowing from Paradise” creating a great “pile of debris” that “grows skyward” before the Angel of History. Benjamin observed, as Young is keenly aware, “This storm is what we call progress”. This is an exhibition of rainbows turning into clouds, and landscapes made of wind.

Opening Event: Wednesday 19 April, 6 – 8pm.

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