Jason Young

Jason Young

Jason Young is a New York–based artist whose work explores the meeting point of painting, sculpture, and light. For more than three decades he has pioneered the use of urethane resin and automotive lacquer to create works whose depth is not painted but physically built, transforming the traditional illusion of space into a tangible optical experience. Rooted in classical technique yet unmistakably contemporary, his paintings invite viewers into surfaces that shift with changing light, movement, and perspective.

Jason spent my early years learning to lie convincingly. Trompe-l’œil — the classical trick of making flat paint read as real depth — first in Lacoste, then apprenticed to Yuri Kuper in Normandy. I got good at the illusion of light on a surface.

Resin ended that. Built up in urethane resin and automotive lacquer over acrylic and wood, the depth is no longer a trick — it’s actually there, layer beneath layer, the way light actually sinks into water. Jason Young was among the first painters to explore urethane resin as a fine-art medium, and thirty years on it still does something no pigment can: it holds light instead of describing it.

Most of the work is water at the edge of a day — the moment a sunset breaks apart on a moving surface. From across a room it settles into abstraction. Up close it becomes an optical event, and because the surface reflects, it never sits still — it takes in the room, the light, whoever is standing in front of it.

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