Untitled (Black and White Abstraction)

About the Work

[In] Young’s work the message is his image of a personal/primal source, in a Jungian sense. The contours of Young’s mound-like shapes are filled in with crushed pastel, rubbed onto the surface of rag paper with forceful gestures. The pigment, in a multitude of colors, mixes into a dense, brownish, rusty earthlike surface. This crude, raw and intimate motif, with its chalky, mossy surface breeding through layers of itself, looks as if some natural phenomenon had produced it—so strong are its organic overtones. Both the ritualistic activity (letting the image arise from the unconscious through rubbings with earthlike pigments) and the recurrence of this primal shape led to a serial structure; all but one gigantic piece is made and exhibited as sets.

...Young starts the rubbings with a black [charcoal] base tone, on top of which he allows the intertwining swirls of “live” color to show their tense muscles and ligaments. 

...The intensification of the contour can also be the basis of evolving sets. Following a sober and stable drawing, the very image itself seems to violently lose control, as if the motif is mutated through a tornado, its surface swept with rapid, vapory powers, its shape swirled, its contours blurred with dust-cloud drama.

_{— Excerpted from Edit deAk's review of Frank Young at the Hal Bromm Gallery (1979), 
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/197904/frank-young-67771, accessed 5-25-2022}