Aaron Young Private Collection; Acquired directly from the artist
Catalogue Essay
Aaron Young plays with the suggestive power of subliminal imagery and pop culture in the present lot, Focus On The Four Dots In The Middle Of The Painting For Thirty Seconds, Close Your Eyes And Tilt Your Head Back (Frantic Fruit), 2007. The instructions in the title direct the audience to take their role in the mental visualization of the work in a ritualized, near religious, manner, while the parenthetical part of the title taken from the Bubblicious bubble gum flavor “Frantic Fruit” insists that this is an endeavor we enter with our perceptions influenced by our pop culture biases. Based on the predilection of the viewer the resultant optical image can vary from Jesus as seen in the Shroud of Turin, the now ironically capitalized image of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, or the ominous stone-faced serial killer Charles Manson. Akin to Andy Warhol’s Rorschach paintings, Young critiques the objectification of psychological interpretation through the audience’s interpretation.