Close-ups

Chuck Close's "heads" visit WAM

by Leon Nigrosh

BREATHE: DRAWINGS BY MARILYN SOLOMON KALISH
at the George C. Gordon Library, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Road, through January 7, 2001

At the age of six, Chuck Close was already enthralling audiences by performing magic. A half century later and he's still doing it, only instead of using playing cards or cups and balls, he does it with paint. It's true that like all art students of the `60s he started out wrestling with abstract expressionism and trying to see who would become the next Willem De Kooning (1904-1997). But as his classmates began to drift toward minimalism, Close saw a fork in the road and headed directly to figurative realism. His breakthrough work in 1967 was a full nude. Not all that unusual, except that Big Nude was nine feet tall and 21 feet long. From then on, he concentrated on what he refers to as his "heads," monstrous close-ups of peoples' faces, mostly his own, but also friends, family, and other artists. These time-consuming and slickly executed images were almost too real and too scary, with flaring nostrils, bulging eyes, and every pockmark and wart magnificently defined. Somewhere along the way Close decided to let us in on how he makes his paintings. He shows us the expansion grid marks and indicates just how he applies the paint. These were no longer slavish blow-up copies of photographs (they never really were), but rather assemblages of thousands of miniature paintings, put together much like ancient Italian mosaics.

With his latest paintings, Close works from a large-format Polaroid picture of his subject carefully chosen from among many such photos. He lays a grid over the photo and then has this grid formation drawn onto his super-sized canvases. (His paintings have become so large that in order to reach all the extremities he employs a special apparatus to raise and lower them through a slot in his studio floor - much like Cezanne did in his later years.) From then on it takes six to eight months to paint in all the colors and shapes within each element of the grid, always working intuitively, but checking the ever-present Polaroid as well.

To best illustrate the range of his abilities to transform units of painted color into phantasmagoric visages, WAM Curator of Contemporary Art Susan Stoops has chosen to display seven objects that Close has produced during the past 20 years. The earliest work in this show, made in 1982, is not really even a painting, but a 5-foot square black and white image consisting of tiny cold-pressed squares of handmade paper. Phil I, from the permanent collection at WAM, is a precisely composed image of Close's friend, composer Philip Glass, and is an image Close has reproduced often in other media. But this version attests to Close's concern with the craft of his art. Each half-inch bit of paper is tinted just right and perfectly placed, so that from an appropriate viewing distance we see a near perfect rendition - a precursor of many of today's digitally composed computer images - but with the artist's hand obviously involved.

Close's hand is even more obvious in a handmade paper work he made two years later of his oldest daughter Georgia. Here the blobs of varying shades of gray-tinted paper appear to have been hurled against the backing while still wet, much like giant spitballs. At close range we can see only an abstract, monochromatic bas-relief. From a greater distance, a sweet young thing with braids smiles at us. And it is this constant play with visual perception and viewing distance and "dematerialization and materialization" that Close employs to simultaneously beguile and confound us.

Just how far away from the recently completed 7 by 9-foot image of Arne, do we have to get before the face of Close's art dealer comes into full focus? At a paced off 25 foot distance, the colorful grid segments were still quite in evidence. At the "normal' viewing distance of about four feet, viewers are totally swallowed up by the myriad small multicolored diamonds, some of which are composed of as many as seven separate colors. In the final analysis, viewing distance is left up to us -- it simply depends on what kind of experience we want to have.

Perhaps the most intriguing piece in the show is a five by seven-foot woven silk rug set on the gallery floor. Based on a color cartoon supplied by Close, weavers in China produced this decorative floor covering in a limited edition of 20 in 1993. From certain viewing angles the rug is a fascinating array of radiating lines and dots of bright color with a sunburst effect. But stand in just the right place at just the right distance and the scowling image of Close's friend and artist Lucas Samaras appears in all its feigned ferocity.

Although there are just a few works in this exhibit, each is truly representative of Close's capacity to captivate his audiences, offering them a unique participatory experience that will leave them wanting more.

The Worcester Art Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 508-799-4406.