Although Chuck Close has spent his career creating work with
traditional printmaking techniques, he has always retained the panache
of a painter. His earliest black-and-white prints—including
instantly recognizable portraits of the sculptor Keith Hollingworth and
the composer Philip Glass—showcase an intensely rich tonal range
that imbues these images with a sparkling, hyper-real patina. And while
Close’s subjects have never evolved beyond portraits of artist’s
friends, family members, and, most commonly, himself, his style has
grown increasingly abstract and colorful.
Early in his career, he began overlaying grids on photographic
prints in order to faithfully recreate the images on a larger scale.
Initially, they exposed details unique to the photographs, but, over
time, Close used the grids to explore how a viewer interprets visual
information. Like a co-opted iteration of pointillism, Close’s more
recent work appears realistic from afar, but, at close range, these
works dissolve into repetitious patterns of colored dashes and loops.
For an artist who has always worked with teams of printers and in media
that distance the artist’s hand, he has never allowed his personal
touch to be removed from the final product.
Process and Collaboration (organized by the University of
Houston’s Blaffer Gallery) gives ample insight into Close’s art-making
strategies. For the uninitiated, it’s an immersive experience. Finished
prints hang alongside gridded source photographs, copper printing
plates, aquatint test sheets, and more. One sprawling wall charts the
progress of a 126-color silkscreen of the sculptor John Chamberlain.
Over the course of 10 canvases, the image advances from a faint pastel
suggestion of Chamberlain’s face to a startlingly complex interplay of
color.
For those who know the artist’s work well, Close’s work never fails
to dazzle in person. It’s hard to comprehend that these printings are
made, as he insists, “very much by hand.” As Close grids the original
photographs in order to enlarge them piece by piece, the finished
product toes a line between the mathematical and expressive, the
rigidly linear and haphazard. It’s an appearance—a kind of
archaic pixilation—that tempts a viewer to read it as digitally
generated. Perhaps that ability to create images that elicit disbelief
at the same moment they seduce with sheer aesthetic allure is what
makes Close one of America’s most treasured contemporary artists.