The Brooklyn Rail

At first blush, the selection of Chuck Close’s pulp paper works now on view at Pace Prints provides little reason to recall that the artist came of age in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism. As a student in Yale’s Master of Fine Arts program, Close worked—and excelled—in a gestural, painterly mode derived from the work of Hans Hofmann and the so-called “Tenth Street touch” of Willem de Kooning and his followers. But he ultimately established his reputation with monumental portraits created from photographs using an airbrush. Begun in 1968, these works in many ways represent a structured rejection of Close’s background in gestural painting. Visible traces of the painter’s hand give way to impersonal and distanced machine application, improvisation yields to strict process, and subjective content is displaced by the effect of visual objectivity.

The method that Close developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which shaped his practice for the rest of his life, depended on the grid. After ruling a regular grid onto his source photograph, Close meticulously transferred the visual data contained in each modular unit from the photograph to the canvas. The fine detail and control provided by the airbrush allowed the artist to replicate the continuous tone and high fidelity of the photograph, without making moment-to-moment creative decisions or really being conscious of the total image he was building block-by-block. The pulp paper works—many of them multiples—that Pace Prints has gathered in its current exhibition represent an evolution of this method that emphasizes material experimentation and, unlike the photorealistic portraits of the 1970s, visually reveals the geometric structure of Close’s procedure.

Take Self-Portrait (Rigid) (1982), one of the most straightforward examples of what Close is up to. In this work, the bearded and bespectacled face of the artist, familiar from his paintings, is assembled as an orderly array of handmade paper chicklets, small squares in twenty-four shades of gray that Close has marshalled into a pixelated image. Close’s characteristic grid structure maps the material surface of the image’s support, marking the lines of division between individual image units: inexpressive squares of pulp paper that measure out the surface of the page one cell at a time. But in many of Close’s later paintings that make the geometric structure of their composition visible, the grid also serves as a kind of screen to look through onto a pictorial space that, although shallow, is certainly volumetric and illusive. One cannot help but think of Leon Battista Alberti’s famous veil: the gridded scrim the painter interposed between his eye and his subject as a means of regimenting the perception of space. Remnants of this optical experience remain in the pulp paper works, even those as decisively material- and surface-oriented as Self-Portrait (Rigid).

This is made clear as soon as we turn to the right and encounter Self-Portrait/String (1982) on the adjoining wall. Built from the same image as its neighbor, this work represents an experiment that Close did not pursue directly. Rather than applying pulp paper squares to a sheet, Close suspended them on a lattice made of string that takes the form of—you guessed it—a grid. Rather than functioning as a means of spatial mapping, the grid seems to be asking, “What is the minimum material substrate or support necessary for the image to cohere?” But the work also, in itself, becomes a kind of optical device to look through onto the real space beyond—Alberti’s veil is made coextensive with the image itself, which hangs suspended and visually porous to its surroundings.

Although Close never produced more works using this mode of construction, the optical experience that it proposes continued to play a crucial role in his exploration of pulp paper. Pace Prints cannily acknowledges this by displaying, as if they were self-sufficient works, two of the metal matrices used to create some of Close’s most ambitious pulp paper images. One of these, which was used to produce Phil Manipulated (1982), takes the form of a tight, regular grid, each cell carefully numbered to identify what shade of pulp will fill it. The interior sides of the cells are also painted in yellow and green, red and blue, so that a ghost of the final image is visible when you look at the matrix itself. Because the paint is on the inside of the grid and the face remains blank, the image comes in and out of visibility as you move around the gallery. Straight on you see through the grid—Alberti’s veil once more—to the shadows it casts on the wall behind. But at a raking angle the face of Phillip Glass appears as if by magic. Again, the image and the geometric means of its construction become one and the same—but here Close’s optical gamesmanship is mediated by the movement of the viewer’s body.

The body also plays an important role in the finished work this matrix was used to create. As its title, Phil Manipulated, suggests, this is not a straightforward multiple. Once the image had been put in place, Close physically intervened, pulling and pushing the still-wet pulp with his fingers. Suggestions of such adjustments are clear in the finished image—especially in Glass’s shock of curly hair. This manual, improvisatory manipulation of image material, the result of the artist’s (literal) hand at work, returns us to the question of expressionism, as well as the larger trajectory of Close’s oeuvre. Phil Manipulated restages more directly a device that Close had been exploring in symbolic terms since the late 1970s, when he began using his own fingerprint as a modular image unit. Close’s fingerprint works transform the indexical presence of his own hand—within the expressionist aesthetic a guarantor of spontaneity and immediacy—into a standardized unit that could be arranged, like his squares of pulp paper, within the modular grid of his compositions. There is a tension here between the inheritance of Close’s training as a gestural painter and his later adoption of a more controlled, mechanical, and conceptual way of working. This is made yet more obvious in Close’s oil paintings that transform the visible grid units of the image into vivid gestural abstractions in miniature—the earliest of these are contemporary with the pulp paper works.

Close’s growing openness during the early 1980s to improvisation, intuition, and even chance makes its presence felt at Pace Prints through one of the most notable works included in the exhibition: Georgia (1984). This image reveals none of the grid structure; instead, it is built in irregular accumulations of pulp paper that seem to have been distributed without any particular governing principle beyond that of the likeness of Close’s subject: his daughter. This work was derived from a collage that Close had created a few years earlier. While developing the pulp paper works, bits of material would fall to the studio floor and dry into irregular ovoid chips. Close collected them, and then used the aleatory selection of forms he accumulated to create a unique collage image. Close’s early collaborator on the pulp works, Joe Wilfer, built a brass armature that mimicked the flowing and irregular contours of the collage—this matrix (also on view) allowed Georgia to be re-created, one of an edition of thirty-five.

Here, the interplay between subjective improvisation and structured process reaches an expressive apex. Georgia depends directly on the imposed structure of the matrix that forms the image, but no hint of the impersonal discipline of the grid remains. This is a particular act of intuitive creation fixed in place and made replicable. But there is always a catch: when you look at the armature used to create Georgia, the image is visible, encoded in Wilfer’s dense web of brass. But it becomes almost an afterthought compared with the dramatic and ever-shifting shadows that the scrim throws onto the gallery wall behind. Unlike the matrix used to create Phil Manipulated, which transforms from projected grid to visible image in a fairly predictable way, here the viewer’s visual experience is nearly overwhelmed by a ghostly bodying forth of abstract arabesques and loops, like one of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings transformed into a shifting play of shadows.

To me, the matrix for Georgia speaks more directly to the contradictions that make Close’s art compelling than any other work on view at Pace. Discipline, yes, and a logical, modular, replicable process play central roles—but they remain haunted by the traces of visual and embodied experiences that, for better or worse, can’t easily be controlled or rationalized.