Review in Border Crossings Magazine, August 2023, written by John Luna, Read the review…
The tension in Youds’ installation lies within the essential need to store, categorize and transport humans and the need for humans to express their humanity, their individuality, and their connection to the natural world. In titling his work, For Everyone a Fountain, Youds borrows from Canadian architect Moshe Safdie’s idealist design theory presented in For Everyone a Garden. Youds shares Safdie’s utopian notions of architecture’s potential for social transformation or at least has faith in the power of design to enhance community, be it through the introduction of concrete thoroughfares or green spaces, which act as small yet important footnotes to a pastoral existence. In an article about an earlier series of paintings—handmade ultramarinemantra—in Canadian Art Youds speaks of “a rustic modernism, encoded with an urban patina of longing for a self once imagined and enabled within nature”—a sentiment which seems very present in For Everyone a Fountain.
– Diana Freundl, Robert Youds, For Everyone A Fountain, Urban Space and Storage, Displaced Nature and a Telematic Approach to Reality, March 2018
Read the full catalogue text…
What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be. — Alain Badiou
When Robert Youds was ordering aluminum sawhorses at the local hardware store franchise in Victoria, Canada in the summer of 2017, a crowd of employees began to gather behind the desk in response to the size of the order. Rather than a handful of sawhorses for a domestic project, Youds had ordered sixty. One worker finally broke from the pack and asked with both curiosity and some trepidation, what he was using them for. Youds replied: Event planning.
Youds’ wordplay is not an addendum but a continued performance of his conceptual practice as it moves from the world and spaces of the everyday to aesthetic objects that relate to language, light and information systems. This anecdote reflects the artist’s humour and also his generosity: why make the staff uncomfortable? He quickly located words that would slip across worlds, create spaces of welcome and hospitality in both the functional and instrumentalized realm of objects and consumption, and toward the post-Fordist worker, still stymied in the current century by the obfuscated end result, whether it is a wedding, a staff retreat, or an art installation.
– Lisa Baldissera, Robert Youds, For Everyone A Fountain, Event Planning: For Everyone A Fountain, May 2018
Read the full catalogue text…
Robert Youds’ artistic practice has evolved from an investigation of the material and gestural conventions of painting to the creation of hybrid works that draw upon the vocabulary of architecture, design, and the vernacular built environment. The artist has constructed his images cumulatively, exploring painting’s capacity to simultaneously create a virtual, pictorial space and to assert itself as a physical object. Through his sophisticated use of artificial light, he creates haptic works that function as both objects and images, involving the viewer in intimate, phenomenological experiences of perception. Youds is fascinated by the presence of artificial light in our daily environment. He has made it a central element in his practice, recognising that the depiction of natural light has largely shaped the history of painting.
– Heather Anderson, For Everyone a Window, catalogue text for the exhibition It Is What It Is, Recent Acquisitions of New Canadian Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2010
It is hard to pin down the work of Robert Youds. Alternately revealing a cool detachment and humour and a rigorous, intelligent approach to painting and beyond, his projects investigate perception and involve a range of architectural and three-dimensional expression. Most recently, Youds has extended his investigations to include an exploration of the perceptual possibilities of light. A selection of these works, completed over the past decade, is presented together for the first time in beautifulbeautiful artificial field, along with new work created as an investigation of site-specific conditions.
– Lisa Baldissera, catalogue introduction for the exhibition, beautifulbeautiful artificial field, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Fall, 2007
Youds’ approach to specificity and aesthetics can be characterized as constituting an “and/if/or/but” proposition that makes self-refection, cognition, and experience its object.
– Saul Ostrow, Robert Youds: The Real as Subjected to Form, catalogue text for the exhibition, beautifulbeautiful artificial field, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Fall, 2007
When I first experienced your work, thinking back to the paintings from about 1982 to 1985 in your downtown Toronto studio, I was always struck by the tension between the depiction of a light source as an “image” and other real things, such as wood or metal fixtures, in contrast to the formal properties of the paint. These two seemingly opposing acts – playing with the illusion of a depicted light source or a specific material and at the same time creating an experience for the viewer with light from the formal paint properties – seemed strikingly different.
– Karin Davie in conversation with Robert Youds, catalogue text for the exhibition, beautifulbeautiful artificial field, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Fall, 2007
Since the 1980s, Robert Youds has conducted a singular investigation of the material conditions of the pictorial – a path that has led him from paintings with cut-out apertures through stretched lines of colour made of strands of latex and velvet cushions bound with ropes through to his recent constructions incorporating fluorescent, neon and LED lights. Throughout, the works have been tough-minded yet sensually seductive, dramatic yet elusive. I already knew, from our casual conversations, that his thinking on artistic issues was pinpoint sharp; as I was preparing an essay for his exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, I decided to pose a few questions on a more formal basis.
– Barry Schwabsky, Interview with Robert Youds, With Light, The Victoria Artist Develops a New Kind of Painting, Canadian Art Magazine, Fall 2007
Read the entire interview in Canadian Art Magazine, Fall 2007…
Having established a reputation as an abstract painter in the 1980s and early 1990s, by 1995 Victoria, BC, artist Robert Youds began to accentuate various material attributes of the picture, sometimes more so, sometimes less, supposing modern painting to be in an eternal, elliptical dance around modern sculpture. In I Feel the Air of Another Planet, Youds isolates basic conditions – light and henceforth visibility – that would seem to finally settle upon painting. Close attention reveals every detail of this work to be crafted, every illusion to be exposed, and the picture to be as complicated as ever.
– Ben Portis, I Feel the Air of Another Planet, catalogue text for the exhibition, The Shape of Colour, Excursions in Colour Field Art 1950 – 2005, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2005
Trained at the University of Victoria and York University, Robert Youds has had a distinguished career as a painter and teacher, and had evolved a distinct visual vocabulary. In a series of works since the beginning of his career, he has challenged and subverted the usual assumptions about artmaking in general and painting in particular. He does so by conducting a dialogue with history, painting and painting ideas of the past that inform his work but do not define it. Youds uses what is useful to his particular circumstances and discards the remainder. The message of his work might be, in simple terms, that what we regard as painting needs renovation.
– Ian M. Thom, Art BC: Masterworks from British Columbia, published by Douglas & McIntyre & Vancouver Art Gallery, 2000
Today, in a media saturated world, abstract art by Besemer, Gillmore and Youds, might be said to be preoccupied or even compelled by a huge number of references, including abstract art. The kind of abstraction proposed by these three North American artists then is not in opposition to other art, but is rather an extension of it and an embrace of its contradictions, ellipses and aporia. The rolled paintings of Besemer, the language introductions of Gillmore and the wry commentaries of Youds’ “last” paintings and mall-Mondrian constructions are like a shadow of earlier abstraction. They deliberately ghost modernism’s purity by producing its unconsciousness: they produce its allegiance to decoration, to language and to philosophical extremes. Besemer, Gillmore and Youds even mock earlier work in abstraction as a kind of doppelganger without becoming nonsensical. They understand their status is no longer that of a historical engine of revolutionary change but that perhaps of evolutionary development.
– Bruce W. Ferguson, catalogue text for the exhibition, Five Continents and One City, Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico City, 2000
These paintings vacillate between self-reflexive absorption in the process of their making and a polemic that implies a reordering of the conventions that traditionally divide high modernism and the rumpus room. In this respect, Youds acknowledges a debt to the traditions of modernist abstraction while underscoring the decay of the certainties upon which those traditions were based. Through this play between past and present, his work affords the viewer an opportunity to reflect on the process of cognition without the certitude usually required for resolution.
– Grant Arnold, Shared Terrain / Contested Spaces: New Works by Fifteen B.C. Artists, catalogue text for the exhibition, Topographies, Aspects of Recent B.C. Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1996 - 1997
Flirtation evidences a wish to sustain the life of desire and Robert Youds has conducted a fifteen-year flirtation with the premises of modernist painting, engaging it at many levels but not settling on one performance which would foreclose on future possibilities. The pleasure of his engagement is evident in these paintings whose very subject is the distance between desire and its extinction in understanding.
– Willard Holmes, catalogue text for the exhibition, Robert Youds: Forse Che Si, Forse Che No (Maybe Yes, Maybe No), Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 1994, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, AB, 1994, The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, 1995.