ICONIC ALCHEMY // TAYLOR YOUNG’S ORNATA SACRAMENTUM AT TULSA ARTISTS’ COALITION

by Ariana Jakub Brandes

In the corner of my grandfather’s house, his icons watched over us. Housed in golden frames, they stacked to the ceiling, moving a bit in the flickering of the candlelight. Saints, I presume, though we were never introduced. They served as symbols of the spirit that allowed him to escape a gulag, surviving for days on an appetite of faith. Those golden saints have made their way to my house, though diluted with works I’ve collected and ephemera of my lived experience.

It is from this memory that I begin my conversation with OKC-based artist Taylor Young, who describes his works as iconographic images in a divine light. “These works are an amalgamation of my experiences, stories I am told, stories I tell myself and the natural world.” But these bright, white, unframed images look far from the traditional golden men peppered throughout my walls.

Adustus lures me in with a large golden circle painted at the top, in front of which falls a man headfirst. He gracefully braces for a meeting with what may be below. The downward movement is rendered so gracefully that the visual works any direction you rotate the work. Several feathers on either side of the man’s feet create white silhouettes in front of the gold circle. A translation of the title from Latin suggests the sun has dislodged the man from the sky and suddenly we are in the theater of Greek mythology.

As in Breugel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, we are the only witness to this man’s descent, his misfortune becoming a moment of beauty. Just as Breugel organizes the viewer’s path through his painting, through his placement of figures, Young is skilled at leading the eye around his works using design elements. With a penchant for balanced compositions, unified color palettes, and harmonic placement of objects, his training in printmaking is on full display. Golden vertical lines from the sun curtain around our falling subject, connecting the young man to the source of his glowing demise.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the long, narrative poem in Latin within which the story of Icarus is written, has remained a stalwart source of artistic inspiration—from the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and even memorably rendered in collage by Matisse. Such illustrations emphasize the longevity and lure of this story throughout time, making it a natural subject for an artist interested in iconography and folklore. Young’s work carries on this artistic tradition using a distinctively modern style.

His mixed-media paintings, all painted on white watercolor paper, contain base layers of watercolor and gouache. Details are added with charcoals and chalk pastels as well as colored pencil. Gold acrylic paint appears in almost all of his paintings, a representation of the divine light of the spiritual world common to much iconography. His spare, modern symboling of flora and fauna recalls English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley: confident, sensual, enticing and attractive.

A smaller painting only slightly larger than an actual heart, Sacrum, feels ripe with the spirit of Young’s recent trips to Mexico. Placed atop a purple rose, the four chambers of the heart are distinguished in muted primary colors. In the center is a black pupil floating inside an eye shape radiating golden lines, a motif appearing in several other works. The images in Young’s paintings are created intuitively from stored visuals of his travels and all that “stuff around us” that can end up as subconscious sources of inspiration. “I am able to look back at a time and place and see what I was truly working through in my own life and the world around me,” says Young when reflecting on his work.

Tribus Alis Serpentibus Aurora’s circular composition is like looking through a telescope to discover a hidden figure in the sky, or a portal into the mind of the artist. Echoes of halos and heavenly imagery are organized around a bare-chested, triplewinged man. Striking a couture pose, the hairless, faceless figure stands within the coiled bodies of two red cobras—perhaps they are one animal. The juxtaposition of a winged man with snakes, common Christian symbols of heaven and evil, is unusual and fierce, challenging their traditional Christian meanings. This angel is rendered even more strange by a single eye that appears vertically across the man’s entire face, resembling an Egyptian scarab: a symbol of rebirth, immortality and protection. Gold, associated with traditional icons and seen in most of Young’s work, is largely absent from this scene.

Like Nox Fae Floribus, Young’s more recent works, many of which will be visible in his upcoming show Ornata Sacramentum at the Tulsa Artists’ Coalition Gallery, feel more experimental and complex. The hanging configurations of his artworks in his home have generated new, larger narratives based in “nature, self-created folklore, and my own personal experiences.” The white negative space feels less sharp in these more populated compositions.

The difficulty of titling artworks is tempered through Young’s use of Latin. Used for scientific classifications and a blueprint for many other languages, his Latin titles imbue works with a scholarly sophistication. Young enjoys listening to what others see in his work, reducing any restrictions a title might have in crafting a viewer’s own interpretation. Similarly, the absence of frames—works are only suspended in bolted glass—allows the viewer to consider these artworks as part of something larger, perhaps connecting to one another across the walls.

Looking back around the room where I wrote this piece, there’s a painting of Don Quixote’s horse staring at one of my grandfather’s saints on the opposite wall. He’s gesturing a blessing to the equine, a correspondence I’ve never made until now.

Ornata Sacramentum will be shown at the Tulsa Artists’ Coalition Gallery from July 7 through July 29. You can also see Taylor Young’s work on Instagram at @tcryoungart.

ARIANA JAKUB BRANDES is an artist, educator, and writer who lives in Tulsa. She teaches art at Cascia Hall.