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For the best part of his career John Young's work has been concerned with the problematics of aesthetic production, and particularly with art's reception when the exchange of authorial intent for public codification occurs. For a number of years Young programmatically repainted the late works of Andre Derain, in which the painter recanted his former position as a progressive modernist to return to traditional pictorial values and representational skills, producing images which in comparison with his Fauvist works seem sentimental, often to the point of kitsch.
The replicated harlequins of Derain, however, occupied only a segment of Young's canvas, which, characteristically, was divided into longitudinal bands. Derain, the lapsed modernist, was bracketed by the end point of the teleological process which was modernism in painting-the grid. The modern and the anti-modern, the plenitude of historical completion and the subversion of its rejection were embraced in the same work, though in its structural role the grid assumes primacy over the figurative element imprisoned within its superior order.
Countless words have been written on the significance of the grid in the art of this century; its role in the defeat of relational abstraction, its connection to Western rationalism and its value as a sign of postmodern closure. Such discussion has necessarily spilled over into the consideration of the work of John Young since the grid has been a constant element in his painting and drawing, juxtaposed with various groups of figurative imagery. But perhaps what is more important than the sign value of either figuration or abstraction is the way their nexus speaks of the process of legitimation in the reception of art: the determination to read the late work of Derain