Chuck Close - Self-Portrait (Pink T-shirt), 2013
Archival watercolor print on Hahnemuhle rag paper.
75 x 60 in. Edition of 10
In
Chuck Close’s career, writes biographer
Christopher Finch, “cross fertilization has been the chosen method of propagation, with each technical approach informing every other.” This is particularly true of
Close's experiments with printmaking: his most recent print editions, a series of archival watercolor prints published by Magnolia Editions, evinces a sophisticated hybrid of the artist's mechanically rigorous grid format with the spontaneous, painterly blushes and blooms of his works on canvas. While this series of prints has direct antecedents in the systematic, color-separated watercolors
Close began creating in the 1970s, the allover, continuous nature of these recent compositions blurs figure and ground and distorts pictorial legibility in a manner reminiscent of his looser, more abstracted oil portraits from the mid-1990s. Yet these prints have their own unique character, and are notable for arguably being Close’s first major body of digital work, excepting his tapestry editions.
Contemporary digital imaging is recognizable by the relentless ferocity of its realism: with each technological advance, image files contain additional millions of pixels, and prints are created from tinier and tinier picoliters of ink, in turn yielding greater degrees of detail. As informed viewers, this level of detail clues us to the image’s composition. Even if the pixels are too small to see, we know that a mechanical process must have been involved in generating an image of such precise mimetic accuracy. In the case of
Close’s airbrush portraits of the 1970s, the expected machine was a camera; in the present day, we trust that software and digital printers are responsible for the wealth of detail before us. Then and now,
Close’s work delights in confounding our expectations.
Chuck Close - Self-Portrait (Yellow Raincoat), 2013
Archival watercolor print on Hahnemuhle rag paper.
75 x 60 in. Edition of 10
In
Close’s watercolor prints, a uniquely digital precision is conflated with the gauzy abstraction and tactile values of watercolor – that plebeian, Sunday painter’s medium, an art-historical byword for Impressionistic lyricism. As the viewer’s eye relaxes focus, the subject’s face coalesces, rich with the color and tonality afforded by digital media; sharpening one’s gaze, the surface of the prints dominates: an array of tiny, sensuous color field paintings, each square reading individually as a wet blur or puddle of pigment.
Close has embedded the “subtle shifts in materials [and] devices” directly within the work, playfully disarming the received wisdom that poses an artificial distinction – whether historical or otherwise – between such seemingly disparate technologies as inkjet printing and watercolor.
This embedded tension, a series of visual and perceptual frissons between surface and figuration, digital and analog, pixels and pigment, beaux-arts tradition and 21st-century technophilia, makes no conclusive statement; it is instead the record of an open-ended inquiry, one currently engaging a great number of Close’s contemporaries. Writing about
Christopher Wool in 2011,
Mark Godfrey asks: “How does an artist show painting’s involvement in technological networks of digital photography and printing – yet also engage the specific marks that only liquid materials can form when spilled and smeared, or when their pigments and binding mediums are allowed to separate?” That
Close is not the only one exploring this Moebius loop of digital and analog processes reveals his role within a larger discourse of image-making — a discourse that is as crucial to his process as the pigment and substrates with which he works.
- Nick Stone
More art by Chuck Close from Magnolia Editions
