Tom Young

In a series of paintings done over the past eighteen years, Tom Young’s canvases record the ongoing devastation in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. A precious value of Art is to stay socially engaged and bear visual testament to the erasure of cultures and peoples. In the first third of the last century, Walter Benjamin, in his critical assessment of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), stated that as winds would push an angel backwards into the future, his eyes and wingspan remain focused, en-framing the piling up of one catastrophe on top of another.

Recently, Arundhati Roy, in a searing comment on activist energies in a late-stage capitalist world, stated “[t]he only moral thing” the current wretched of the earth “can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihood.” In Tom Young’s ethically motivated art, the paintings are not only evidence of a previous stage of the Arab world’s catastrophe- that is, a present process still carrying the trace of its past unravelling- but also the later stages of a Dickensian witness to homeless children being made to walk on continuously without shelter as the globalization of cities like Beirut swallow up its ever-increasing refugee populations- from Palestine or Syria. Whether it is the outstretched pull of global financial centers, once centers of empire themselves, or the criminality of colonialism’s present, or the drive toward power pushing others into stateless exile, wretched invisibility and cruel injustice is marked in Tom Young’s paintings.

It is difficult to suggest a particular painting to begin to highlight on this catastrophe. However, since October 7th, its understanding looming heavy, how criminality is understood in the attempt to erase and re-inscribe is vital. ‘Criminal,’ a painting from 2009, selected for a contemporary art exhibition in Gaza City, had its first viewing in the public eye by way of a digital projection on a wall in Gaza; for a secondary dimension of reality was forced by Israel’s blockade, which prevented delivery of the actual painting. The process and medium of viewing itself enacted the multiple veiling of physical connection, rendered ever more unreachable by colonial entrapment.

Walter Benjamin, in his artwork essay, had claimed that works like poster art were an example of a loss of aura, in his case, the impression one gets of an art work, its craft and experience of seeing it upfront, in contrast to seeing it in its present virtual form. The display of ‘Criminal’ in Gaza, through virtual means, is not simply the artwork, in whatever form it comes, and its presentation to the public. Its visibility as a copy-at-a-loss is a matter of the politics of aesthetics that would never allow Gazans the right to view the way some artists, living outside its lived reality, and how they have come near to understanding it. ‘Criminal,’ as such, becomes a threat to ward off by the Israeli state and it becomes a means to prevent the Gazan population from seeing the growing empathy to their plight and struggle against Israel’s colonial rule. The painting was eventually exhibited in 2024 at Beit Beirut Museum (itself, a battle-scarred former sniper’s nest in the heart of the Lebanese capital) and sold to raise funds for Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah’s Children’s Fund.

Still, ‘Criminal’ stretches beyond any fixed historical situation. As such, it can be symbolic of power walling up and in those it seeks to silence, deject, and eject. October 7th, in mainstream media, has been read as an unprovoked Palestinian act of aggression without reference to a Zionist settler population illegally occupying land and homes from which the Israeli state evicted Palestinians. Mainstream media, as a sector of Big Brother’s divested energies, forgets the history of colonialism’s force: when to start a story and to capture people’s minds within this frame. But when one is caged up for so long and made to suffer slow and fast violence, an act of aggression can be seen as a colonized will not to die. 

If the contemporary presence of ‘Criminal’ makes a satirical andabsurd comment on how one tries to speak about the power to name, then, surely, ‘Innocent’ (2023), presents a surreal depiction of human life coming out from under the rubble. Even today’s mainstream and, more critically, independent media, showcases how the Palestinians’ trial to speak is gaining permissibility, even popular revolutionary disseminating strength.

In Tom Young’s vision, the boy (based on a sketch made from life of a boy in East Jerusalem in 2008) seems to come out from under and over the rubble exhibited in newspeak and newsreels to show himself. The question is under what or under whose permission. At the top of the painting, there is an eerie light, or rather the trace of its rays. It recalls the light from above the tower in ‘Criminal’ that represents not the power of the moon but the power of the colonial state to name, to track, to control. Or is it the heavenly light of relief which welcomes the boy upon his death?

Even more than that, it recalls Guernica (1937). In the painting by Pablo Picasso, the eerie light is one of interrogation or surveillance or even light upon the darkness of utter destruction lighting up Fascist Spain andNazi Germany over a Basque town. These signifying signs over Tom Young’s painting might pale in comparison to the boy; but the boy, likewise, seemingly full of life and innocence, cannot speak as much as his facial impact tugs on the heart. What does Palestine speak today? Certainly, it is equally as heartening as it is devastating. The lionized strength of the Palestinians speak from the rubble of Israel’s destructive power, whether it is Gaza, or1948 Palestine, or the West Bank, which is equally being further fragmented into separate archipelagos of meager existence. It is a slow and unacknowledged death from an ever-increasing strangle-hold.

Does the boy staring at us demand that we do something to help? If so, what? And how? What is the power of the viewer to affect change once seeing the painting? Is the viewer equally trapped? Is it a psychological enquiry the artwork produces? Or is it to generate action, action which even in today’s U.S.and European campuses has managed to bring the issue to central focus, garner ever more public support for Palestine, but still not affect the speed of the genocide Israel affects upon the Palestinians?

It seems to create more freedom fighters against an onslaught of doublespeak that has legally aligned antisemitism with anti-Zionism. The Palestinian face seems larger than life but so does a person on a missing poster. To whom does one seek assistance when Israel has destroyed all the infrastructure in Gaza or utterly controls all forms of governmental power inmost of 1948 Palestine? To whom does one seek aid when students and professors and activists speak out only to be tortured by the modern police state that claims to be hemming in hate-speech while committing unspeakable atrocities in alliance with the Israeli colonial juggernaut.

Tom Young’s art work is itself a process speaking to such inability to find answers whether it is in talking to parents, which opens upan abyss of catastrophic trauma, or trying to find answers among the rubble of Gaza which lies in the background. Still, the background’s horror seems to overcome a larger-than-life boy whose innocence prevails against the sheer power of technological barbarity.

If the boy coming from under the weight of Gaza’s ongoing Nakba reads back the innocence of life taken that nothing can recompense, ‘Trashed’ goes to a site of the Nakba not spoken about enough in media: the refugee camp.This camp is not within Palestine but in Lebanon. Moreover, it is not just in any refugee camp but Sabra and Shatila which bears the brunt of its own history of devastation as a site of suspended life since 1948, the horror of Israeli forces supervising Lebanese Phalangist mass murder of Palestinian life in 1982, and the disposable life that the state of Lebanon gives to its own neglected population in the present day.

‘Trashed’ is not just a mark of how the Nakba of 1948 has affected the Arab world, symbolising how the imperial world desired that the region be turned into the ‘Middle East’, a subservient proxy of imperial power that produced nations and divisions within and against Arab populations and the others that coexisted with it.

‘Trashed’ also showcases how the 2015 trash crisis in Lebanon which the ordinary citizen has complained upon from time to time over the last ten years is worse around the refugee camps, sites of disposable life. Even the Palestinian sign, the key of homes nostalgically remembered, is turned into a second order representation. It is among the pieces of debris out of the child’s reach, not even a key but a piece of artwork covering a book. It is a sign of a once held dream that, just like many of the other parts of the catastrophe, upon the growing pile of its history. 

In a zoomed-out re-working of the concept, ‘Trashed (Aftermath)’, adjusted in response to the port explosion of 4th August 2020 which devastated much of Beirut, Young’s painting shows the child almost indistinguishable from that waste. It renders not only the physicality of life but the psychological life of a child brought down by wretched everyday existence. 

Art can show how a once touristic site of beauty that Lebanon used to represent to a European audience can be overcome by human detritus in a weak state; but Tom Young has stretched that ethic to its most vulnerable and profound site: the refugee camp. 

However, these sites of wretched existence are hardly recognized. The realism of the global world is governed by build-up and coverup not facing down. Tom Young’s ‘Catastrophe (Les Voyeurs)’ is significant in its titling. It nearly en-jambs two words that have their understanding on two different sides: the side that is often heard being the incapable of understanding viewer, provided simulacra of occurrences; and the ones who suffer and are not deemed recognizable except in symbolic utterance. Still, the parentheses are crucial here; parentheses not only suggest those and that which is being marginalized but who and what cannot speak publicly. 

In titling this painting in such a way, Tom Young’s painting gives voice to the event trying to be rendered. The height of the cable-car registers the happiness detached tourists’ life may be suspended. It instead looks on, not at its own terror of suspension on a wire, but the life below, the reality of desperate suffering. But can the modern reading of Nietzsche’s tight-rope walker trying to get to the other side without looking down at the life below be the role of art today? The painting has its history that Tom registers as that build-up of the global site of investment that covers over in surround-sound-sense the refugee crisis and, in many cases, uses the labor of refugees or near such, to build its shining edifices. In its present name and condition, the painting reads the U.N-supplied tents that removes agency from refugee life and turns it into international protection at the behest of the state, a weak state’s cruelty.

The painting leads out in its background not to protection but to destruction. Whether that destruction is to former life in whatever state who can tell: whose people’s history it represents is not known. It is just rendering the life of so-called international protection absurd. Still, the painting fronts the refugee life as its most precarious and silenced form. As the viewer goes out to the vanishing line, the sea and the horizon present themselves. It is not hope one confronts but a late and uncanny Turner-esque flame-like sunset of blues and oranges. But this sunset is not a romantic scene; instead, the foreboding glow suggests the mythopoetic license of a catastrophe that cannot be read. All that can be noted is the life that would have been there but that can never again speak for itself.

Throughout his tenure in Lebanon, Tom Young has painted large landscapes of the city of Beirut that would play on, up, and down the romantic way of viewing landscape art. His technique swipes over it to deny it possibility; a romantic idyllic scene of swinging in the center of Beirut is denied as absurd. Now, he will tie this denial to a capitalist twinning of the empire that once was to the devastation of its investment. In “Double Standard”(2024), Tom’s canvas works over the earlier denials of romanticism with an anti-capitalist and anti-imperial critique.

Hypocrisy is laid bare: in the center of the painting lies the undeniable realization of London’s iconic Tower Bridge and by its side the utter destruction and devastation of colonial rule. Unlike “Catastrophe (Les Voyeurs)” there is no doubt that the art work is calling out one source that has brought on this wreckage: The Imperial might of Western capitalism bringing unimaginable suffering to the colonized Global South, and perhaps through its own short-sighted stupidity, back on itself?

Again, it is seen from above, from the view of a detached witness. It aims a strike at the metropole of Young’s homeland Britain, synecdochically represented by its famed Bridge, to its imperial ties to a destroyed Palestine, likewise its expression of Empire, through Charles Dickens’ 1863 Great Expectations. Wemmick, at particular times the greatest adviser to Pip, tells him: 

“Choose your bridge, Mr. Pip,” returned Wemmick, “and take a walk upon 

      your bridge, and pitch your money into theThames over the centre arch 

      of your bridge, and you know the end of it. Serve a friend with it, and you 

     may know the end of it too, but it’s a less pleasant and profitable end.”

In Dickens’ bleak novel, the prose strikes a seemingly wonderful act if done singly for one’s own interest. The interest in Dickens is never single because Pip is doing it with money earned by Magwitch who, as a prisoner of His Majesty’s government, succeeded and thrived in a penal colony. ButDickens’ novel is hardly post-colonial. Even Wemmick’s advice is to give Pip to himself alone and to ignore Herbert Pocket to whom Pip is trying to help.

Tom Young’s painting asks: what of that investment? What does it mean today? The answer is a swept over denial of that romantic investment, an investment that has produced refugee lives and devastation. It has not only answered back to the mythopoetic feel of “Catastrophe (Les Voyeurs)” but it has answered a question Edward Said often asked when tackling Zionism, who are colonialism’s victims? The juxtaposition in Tom’s painting is stark and meant to pose for those who look on to make that connection. 

The purpose of Art has often been claimed to be for enjoyment, not for questioning. This is not Tom Young’s ethic. On the surface, his art pays homage to more formal ways of seeing, yet simultaneously asks serious questions about the image, the structure of feeling that colonialism has caused, and its lasting impact in the present of the region that he inhabits. In the art work from the last eighteen years, it is clear that the devastation that the Arab world has and continues to endure is not dated to his lifetime or mine. The paintings offer us, at least, the possibility of an emotional filter through which such an ongoing catastrophe can be recognised.