COCO YOUNG Passage

Night Gallery is thrilled to present Passage, an exhibition of new paintings by Coco Young. This is the artist’s debut solo presentation with the gallery, following her inclusion in our 2023 presentation at The Armory Show, New York, NY and our 2022 group show And Now at Night.

In her feature film from 1965, Le Bonheur [Happiness], Agnès Varda relates a banal situation of adultery in the form of a naturalistic social drama. With a bright palette and images of summer dresses and flower fields, she depicts everyday life and perpetual dissatisfaction with a sense of impressionist enchantment. Le Bonheur conveys an accumulation of impressions, suggesting the visual inspiration of Renoir or Manet. The shades are vibrant, the fades adorned with red and yellow as if to signify that color is here not just as an ornament but also as a vector of meaning.

In Coco Young’s oil paintings, multiple layers seem to hide a similar, apparent romanticism and beating drama. The artist punctuates her lush surfaces with a symbolist approach and escapist dreaminess. The exhibition title itself, Passage, seems to refer to a possible transition from one world to another: childhood to adolescence, life to death. Born in New York City, Young grew up in the south of France, in the picturesque city of Marseille. She spent her childhood in Vallon des Auffes, a neighborhood that resembled a small fishermen village, and among the Provence and Camargue landscapes that inspired impressionist painters such as Cézanne, Monet, and Van Gogh.

Young draws upon these mystical, timeless environments in her work. She appropriates landscape and architectural elements such as fields, flowers, and Roman Mediterranean aqueducts as she converts masculine, Impressionist art histories with a more emotional approach. A significant aspect of her latest series is the striking contrast between her apparently romantic, pastoral landscapes and The Pond, a suddenly violent, if not bloody, representation of red swans. Inspired by Edgar Degas’ Young Woman with Ibis (1857-58) and based on sketches the artist made in Central Park, the work echoes French gardens and brings a sudden, furious twist to the quiet scenery. The Messenger, another profound depiction, embodies a purple bird with a technique recalling Japanese woodblock prints, with a format echoing a panel from a Japanese folding screen. Here again, the tone is more somber; the strange bird may be a bad omen.

Storms, winds, and tormented swells are at the core of Young’s carefully arranged ensemble of works. Rivers and swamps are lined with red poppies and yellow daffodils, evoking the vegetation beneath the body of Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (1851-2) and its attendant melancholy. Young’s paintings reflect on loss, love, and absence as they yearn towards a purity and childhood that are forever lost. “The memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years,” writes Marcel Proust in the last lines of his seminal novel Swann’s Way (1913) as he captures the creative, human desire to stop the ruthless river of time.

—Martha Kirszenbaum