Chuck Close: The Grid

Chuck Close - Lucas I - 1986-87 - Oil and graphite on canvas - 100 x 84 in. (254 x 213.4 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkThe earlier works of Photo-Realist associated with American Photo-Realist Chuck Close (born 1940) are minutely detailed portrait heads he painted on a monumental scale in black, white, and gray. These works, factually rendered, magnified every pore and imperfection to unexpected and unnatural proportions.

Paintings such as “Lucas I" (featured here) depicts fellow artist Lucas Samaras, and are representative of Close's later, more colorful and painterly style. They go beyond the hyper-reality of his earlier portraits and elaborate on his pictorial investigation of the act of perception, breaking down the visual information into component parts that describe the actual process of seeing, not just the end result.” (MetMuseum)

“Photorealist painting of the 1970s celebrated the glossy, mirror-like "look" of the photograph, but after achieving that ideal, Close swiftly turned to portraiture, suggesting it as a means for exploring unsettling aspects of how self identity is always a composite and highly constructed, if not ultimately conflicted fiction.” (The Art Story)

My own appreciation for Close’s work lies in his reliance on (and appreciation of) the grid, as a fundamental tool of art-making, and a means for indepth artistic examination and expression.