ART-USA: The Man of a Thousand Bizarre Faces

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 12 1998 (IPS) - Looking at one of artist Chuck Close’s paintings is always a distinctly unsettling experience – especially because they usually comprise realistic depictions of some of the boldest, most alienated faces ever seen.

So, while the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition of Close’s work simply offers a wide range of his portraits, the show could easily be accompanied by a caption: “Not for the faint of heart.”

Some of Close’s subjects – faces that sometimes are 10-feet tall, depicted in almost excruciatingly precise detail – look as grim and as spooky as such infamous U.S. murderers as Charles Manson or John Wayne Gacy.

The fact that Close’s subjects, often just identified as ‘Phil’ or ‘Keith’, have the rumpled, unkempt and slightly dazed look of New Yorkers living in the 1960s and 1970s contributes to that effect. So does the use of subjects like one woman with a blowhole in her throat – the effect, presumably, of surgery following years of smoking.

The most fascinating thing about Chuck Close – and what sets him apart from other modern artists – is the obsessively precise way he captures such people in his portraits. The Museum’s retrospective is as much about the way such eerily precise paintings are made as about the contents of his compositions.

Close admits that he is beguiled by portraits. “Recently, I’ve realised that when I go to a museum, the works that I stand in front of for any protracted period of time are almost always portraits,” he said in a 1991 brochure about his paintings. “So there must be something there that’s more compelling to me than I ever thought was the case.”

‘Compelling’ is a mild word for the sensation Close’s own portraits conveys. Many of them are based on precise pen-and-ink renditions of clear, sharply lit photographs, which then become translated into paintings so cleanly drafted that almost no trace of brushwork stands out – a style known as Photo-Realism.

Others, however, are like a crazed variation of that realism, with faces split up into colour-coded grids; or into grids and matrices that are marked by particular shapes (like yellow circles or green triangles) rather than the specific facial features they are meant to depict; or, in some paintings, into different shades of white and grey.

All of the portraits start with a photograph, which establishes the baseline for Close’s subsequent deconstruction. The artist then separates the photograph into certain basic components: small squares, a matrix of dots, or possibly just divisions of facial features (like cheeks, or eyes).

Then the fun begins. Close delights in using different materials, from metal plates to linoleum cuts to a medium of dies and plates called ‘spit-bite aquatint’, to create his compositions. Sometimes his portraits will be split into brightly- coloured spots, which still nevertheless correspond precisely – almost in a mathematical way – with the features of the underlying photograph: yellow dots could stand for cheeks, red for facial hair, and so forth.

The ultimate effect is portraits that do not depict faces so much as art itself: they show portraiture that is still nearly as precise as a photograph, but also reveal how paintings construct the appearance of reality through a schematic building of other elements.

At its best, the Close exhibit on display in New York takes several key subjects – like the shaggy-haired Phil, or the bald, bespectacled and bearded painter himself – and shows their faces, always intensely close up, in several different ways, from realistic to grid-like to surreally coloured.

“The route you take is a large part of the experience for the artist, and vicariously for the viewer,” Close says of his precise portrait-making process. For many viewers, it may be a strange route – full of scary characters and unsettling sights – but it could prove to be a worthwhile one.