Chuck, at Close Range

Article by James P. McCabe

The master of monumental portraiture scales it down, for some intimate portraits of family and friends...

in his latest show at Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, in the Chelsea area of New York City... the show closes April 13, so you have only a day or two to get to it... I'm sorry I couldn't get there sooner myself!

Red, Yellow and Blue- The Last Paintings.

There's been some writing concerning Chuck's relevance to current themes like face processing, facial recognition technology, and so on... I'll leave it to you to discover that for yourselves. What you'll actually see when you enter the gallery (one large room) is a dozen or so of Chuck's most recent works- most of them with the familiar grid-transfer method clearly visible, but the process he uses... overlaying transparent washes of red, yellow and blue oil paint... remains as mysterious (meaning impossible to duplicate, even though it sounds easy enough!) as ever...

Although the focus of the show is on those works in which the artist relies on just the progressive washes of the three basic colors, the two works that look most like his hyper-realistic images of the past make astonishing use of other materials. The imperious self-portrait that looks out over the room as you enter is in fact a Jacquard tapestry, produced by an intricate weaving method... and the first in the "Fred" series, right next to the door, utilizes specially manufactured glass mosaic tiles...

What I want to tell you about many of the images in the show, those in which the grid squares are larger, and therefore the likenesses less perceptible...is that I found them to be alive in a way that is hard to explain... almost as if there is a real person there on the other side of a screen, whose image is full of life and constantly shifting in and out of focus...

The show is up until Saturday, April 13, so see it in person if you can.

Chuck Close 1940-2021.

JPM.