This is the first solo show in Italy of the American artist Michael Young. His work stems from the historic avant-garde of our century, that modernist desire to bring culture forward. Young works with the rational visual vocabulary of Kasimir Malevich, the pure geometric forms of Joseph Albers and Kenneth Noland's 'hard edge'. He works within this tradition, his paintings transcend the utopist myth they engender. Michael Young manipulates the 'coniunctio oppositorum', the union of opposites or the tension created from order and disorder, coherence and dissolution, arithmetic and chaos, hot and cold, natural and synthetic. The rational composition works on the edge of symmetry; the materials used - artificial day-glow paint and sand, a natural element create and destroy modernity's myth.

Catalogue: Michael Young, Rome 1991 (text by V. Coen)
Conference of the artist at the American Academy in Rome

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