Peter Young: easy rider of abstraction: the journeys, both stylistic and geographic, of a nomadic American painter in the 1960s and '70s are retraced in a survey now on view at P.S.1

Two recent exhibitions of paintings by Peter Young continue to broaden our understanding of how ambitious artists made their way through the multivalent decades of the 1960s and '70s. Paradoxically, in an era when painting had reached its "degree zero" and supposedly nothing more could be squeezed from its tired corpus, anything and everything was possible. By now paintings made during this period have been duly sorted into the discrete art-historical categories of Post-painterly Abstraction, Color Field, Minimalism, Op, Pop and Process art, to name but a few. The downside of such tidiness is the invisibility of certain artists whose work straddled more than one genre or movement. Fortunately, exhibitions such as "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" [see article this issue] and "Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980" (on view last year at the Studio Museum in Harlem) have gone a long way toward demonstrating how prescient and surprising the art made in these neglected interstices can be.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1940, Peter Young grew up in Southern California. He came east in 1960 to study art history at New York University and began painting a short time after. From 1967 through the early 'SOs, Young exhibited regularly, including solo shows with Rolf Ricke (Cologne), Nicholas Wilder (Los Angeles), and Richard Bellamy and Noah Goldowsky (New York). "Peter Young: 1963-1977," currently on view at P.S.1 in Long Island City [to Sept. 24] is the painter's first solo exhibition in a U.S. museum. A small selection of Young's "Folded Mandala" and Oaxacan paintings at Mitchell

Algus Gallery over the summer rounded out the retrospective. Given the renewed interest in abstraction of the 1960s and '70s, these exhibitions provided a welcome chance to observe a single artist very much alive to the possibilities presented by his own time.

Taken as a whole, Young's oeuvre is marked by a buoyant intellect and a cavalier approach to facture, attributes that seem to propel him effortlessly from one painting idea to the next. Despite such freewheeling attitudes, he is nonetheless a rigorous modernist, and one of his primary subjects is the progress of painting itself. An important early example of Young's thinking is Untitled Box (1965). From afar the work looks like a small, bright blue cube protruding about 7 inches from the wall. Up close it is clear that the object is a painting, a piece of canvas wrapped tightly around some kind of cubic support and covered by an inked grid filled with small red and yellow dots, one per square. Letting paint drop from a small brush to create dots or circles of various sizes would become an essential part of Young's process. In contrast to the sophistication of his later works, one gets the sense that the clunky Untitled Box is the work of a young artist, perhaps made in response to the 1965 article "Specific Objects," one of Donald Judd's early attempts to theorize Minimalism.

Some of Young's enduring formal and material concerns make an appearance in these early works, most importantly his adoption of the dot as a signature picture-making unit. Unlike many of his peers whose search for reductive, resonant forms led them from the grid to the square, Young quickly disposes of the visible grids in his "Untitled Boxes" but holds on to the circle as a principal compositional element. Compared to the sobriety of the square, a circle is a much more sociable, even transcendental, form. In terms of surface and paint application, there is nothing too fancy or precise about the way things are made: the artist's hand is utilitarian, casually laying in small drops of color or', in a subsequent body of work, leaving ragged edges where paint has seeped under the tape. It is this "just enough," workmanlike stance that gives these paintings a currency and freshness that belie their age. This sense of levity continues through Young's palette: color is explored primarily in relation to white. Young has stated that his palette "had a lot to do with living in New York, having a lot of artificial lighting and a sort of psychedelic, yogic insistence on lightness." When black does appear it functions as graphic punctuation rather than tonally.

Over the span of 1966-68, Young seemed to divide his attention between two large series. One of them offers vast expanses of bright white grounds showered with fields of dots. In #24--1968, fat drops of pink, lemon and tangerine paint coalesce into electric arabesques reminiscent of the Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine and Peter Max's posters. The harsh buzz of most Op art is here replaced with the mesmerizing repetition of old-fashioned candy buttons on white paper. The sugary color walks a tightrope between childhood pleasure and stoner reverie. One could argue for a relationship between Young's white paintings and Yayoi Kusama's early monochromes. Starting in 1959, Kusama began exhibiting large, white "Infinity Nets" in New York, including a solo show at Stephen Radich Gallery where she installed one measuring an epic 33 feet. Although Young has cited Agnes Martin as an influence, he and Kusama seem to share a similar Zen/Beat sensibility in that their work doesn't try too hard. You've got to be hip enough to recognize the cosmic vibe, otherwise it just looks like kid stuff.