A Review of Robert Young, Galerie Mira Goddard, Montreal for newspaper weekly art column

1. Review of Robert Young, Galerie Mira Goddard
by Ronnie Caplan
Upon entering The Galerie Mira Goddard (1490 Sherbrooke St. W.) you are
immediately besieged by color and a sense of urgency in the works by Robert Young, a
Canadian artist from British Columbia.
Dream-like canvases unfold before you, spaced comfortably apart and displayed in a
variety of mediums: oil, acrylic, pencil, serigraph and aquatint with etching. Young uses
each medium effectively, taking full advantage to display his techniques. His colors are
clean, flowing and bright, inviting the eye into each work with amazing clarity and
imagery. This rhapsody of inspiration involves the viewer directly by tickling the
imagination.
Robert Young is a photographic realist, catching his objects, figures of human beings,
animals and especially Indians in snapshot poses, forever immortalized within the depths
of his painted borders. He does not stop there though; Young goes one step further by
giving his subjects souls, and an animation that lifts them right off of the canvas! His
work has a surrealistic edge because of this, and can be compared to the paintings by
Giorgio de Chirico in that there is something going on in both these artist’s works, right
beneath the layers of paint so lovingly applied – something alive, and mysterious.
There is a melancholy feeling that hangs over a lot of Young’s paintings, like
“Allegorical Figure”, a sensuous, sad woman chained to her past, as she forever holds onto
the support of the fence behind her, or “Diablero”, of a man lost in contemplation, drifting
aimlessly through a vast bleak landscape. Using acrylics, Young achieves translucent
qualities, with soft brush strokes and subtle, pastel hues. This melancholy is shot through
with hope and uplifting visions that are communicated to the viewer from deep within the
depths of each painting.
In direct contrast with these are Young’s paintings of Indians, bringing us right back
to the stark reality of our own world. In “Momento II”, the two transparent Indians shout
out at the viewer for retribution, striking fear in the heart and chills up and down the spine.
These ghost-like apparitions are tragic and pitifully expressionless, and you know that they
are weary of oppression as the colors fluidly bind them to their land, their environment –
brutal colors that brazenly define the bloodshed of their past. Their shocking and
disturbing faces speak out for a nation of ancestors. Young is very forceful here, almost to
the point of exaggeration, but he gets his message across.