Jack Youngblood, Recent
Work
With tumbling stock markets and bank
freezes in a few European countries, Jack Youngblood’s
proclamation “la la la...when all is lost, and there is
nothing left to lose...celebrate the loss!” may not be
that ridiculous afterall.
Treading similar grounds after his previous work in the
group exhibit The Gloaming, the protagonist spaceman,
Jack Youngblood makes another appearance, foregrounding
the memento mori theme even more strongly. What is
revealing about the digital age, is the sense of loss,
in bits and bytes discussed in the catalogue essay. And
this is reinforced in the paintings, portraying the
spaceman aging to the point of decay, both feet in the
grave. There is an incredible sense of contrast, in the
selection of which print goes next to which, and their
relevance to the title of the show: ‘excellence’ and
‘death’. Simple, but it works.
Where does this place painting in the age of digital
reproduction and touch-ups? Naturalism, and realism are
so augmented that we can no longer discern what is RAW
and what is not. So why bother painting.
The answer seems to lie in the oil painting at the end
of the gallery, primed and exuding presence. One can
imagine the careful choice of perishable soft wood of
the tropics, decaying with the image of the skeleton
spaceman on the board. The weight of the panel seems to
be laden with more than the history of western
painting, but the burden of Photoshop too. This burden,
to blend and merge the best of both media. But it pulls
well together, the soft sheen of organic gloss varnish,
and the gloss-optimised digital inklet prints.
Another development in the artist’s body of work seem
to be the crests of the spaceman, Jack Youngblood in
different renditions, resembling both a knight’s coat
of arms, or a biker gang’s crest. The spaceman, might
just be a knight, charging into space; art space; an
avant-garde metaphor of a new kind of art form making a
strong appearance in the Singapore art scene. There is
a certain charm to this, noble yet crude. The artist
makes no excuse to use the digital paint brush like a
new excalibur, making its stake in a larger concept
than space, cutting up preconceptions of deviant fan
art, making meaningful swiping manoeuvres to push the
objectification of digital paintings, digital paintings
as legitimate art objects and its exceeding relevance
to art making in Singapore and elsewhere. When one
doesn’t comprehend this intention, the work fails to
make any sense.
The work does suggest smallness, the lone spaceman in a
vast universe filled with stars; digital bytes in a
universe of inter-connected servers. This overwhelmed
smallness is comparable to a Nikon website’s flash
animation on the Universe, and Us. This smallness,
reels again in the current climate of financial loss in
the light of the possibility of global recession; but
measured against a greater loss of environmental
damage, and impending doom to mankind’s descendants,
this smallness begs re- measurement. Memento mori, seen
in a environmental light, may just be the phrase we
need to tide us over greed and difficult times.
This exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition
catalogue, stickers, and T-Shirt. Nice.