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Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005
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An exhibit of
more than eighty works in a variety of media consisting almost entirely of self-portraits
- one is hard-pressed to name another contemporary artist so caught up in his own image.
And the portraits, spanning nearly four decades, while certainly showing changes of
personal style (hair length, beard trim, eyeglasses) and the process of aging, are rather
dispassionate, the subject remaining self-protectively closed off, revealing little
of the man behind the face.
Chuck Close: Self Portraits is an intriguing view into the
creative process of the artist, the evolution of the techniques of a master technician who
independently found his own way, not unrelated to his contemporaries, but unique among
them. It could be postulated that Close could have used still life or landscape and
pursued a parallel course to that of his portraits; the focus is process, not subject
matter.
The first of the paintings, "Big Self-Portrait" (1967-1968),
is, indeed, big (nearly nine by seven feet), painted in very thinly spread, black acrylic.
The black-and-white product closely reflects the visual texture of the photographs which
Close chose to use as the basis for his paintings. Close overlays a photograph with a grid
template; the elements of the image/grid are then systematically transposed to another
surface (canvas, paper, printing plate) square by square.
Sol Lewitt, a
contemporary of Close, uses grids in the detailed instructions for the conceptual wall
paintings he designs; both achieve a certain exactness through the technique which evokes
elements of minimalism and process art, even, for Close at times, photo-realism, the
latter morphed, however, beyond the merely representational.
As he works with the grid, though, Close doesn't simply transfer the
image; he plays with it, he deconstructs it. Each square of the grid is filled with a
stroke of color, an inked fingerprint, an etched line--an enrichment through color and
texture that adds an entirely new visual dimension to the work. Seen close up, these
portraits break down into their compositional elements, always recognizable but abstracted
by the technique, not unlike the pointillism of the post-Impressionists. From a distance,
the portrait comes into the more literal photographic focus of the original source.
The extraordinary range of materials that Close uses in the portraits
(oil, acrylic, ink, graphite, paper pulp, Polaroid prints, and more), as well as a
changing palette of color over the years, results in widely varied works within the
strictly defined parameters of the gridded photographs. The perspective over four decades
is of finely honed craft, of obsessive-compulsive application of technique, and of
ever-inquiring explorations and extensions of countless possible permutations and
combinations of elements within his delineated mode.
November 20, 2005 - Arthur Lazere
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