Though this kind of translation has long since become a digital commonplace, the combination of grandeur and charm in Close’s work remains unique.īig Self-Portrait (1967–68), Chuck Close.
As early as 1978, the critic Kim Levin likened his paintings to computer screens and called his realism ‘a matter of code’. With these aggregated fields of data – that is, photographs replicated with the help of grids, the units first smoothed out with an airbrush, then articulated with swirls of paint – he translated facial features into abstracted information. Equally commanding portraits followed, soon in colour, of friends and family. In a black-and-white rendering that makes him seem as big as Mount Rushmore and just as implacable, the artist looks down at us, his chin unshaved and hair dishevelled, a cigarette dangling from his mouth: funny, but sort of chilling.
Multiple young women reported that after praising their work, he invited them to his studio, where he asked them to strip so he could judge whether they would be suitable subjects for a portrait – accounts that rightfully produced outrage, and a sorry denouement to the career of a larger-than-life artist.Ĭlose’s first self-portrait, of 1967–68, was a stunning achievement of verisimilitude, and also a major, minimalism-be-damned kiss-off. Late in his life, it was revealed that Close’s own concerns with social distance didn’t end with painting. The cultural and perceptual registers of scale and proximity have engaged writers from Jonathan Swift to Gaston Bachelard and artists from Van Eyck to Monet to Barnett Newman.
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If we’re nose to nose, Close demonstrated, a face is a universe, as full of mystery as the cosmos. He invited viewers to investigate how close they could come to the surfaces of his paintings and still see the illusion of wondrously realistic portraiture – and then to relish the precise point at which that illusion falls apart, yielding dazzling abstraction.
From the outset of his career until his death this August, Chuck Close played with intimacy.
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