In pursuit of pure realism Chuck Close used a modernist grid to slice up photographs for translation to his monumental airbrushed canvases.
And somewhere along the way he realized that while you could fill
the grid squares with tightly rendered airbrush work of pores and hairs
and such, you could also translate density, hue and saturation to some alternative
space - to create, as I like to call them, faux fractals. That is to take
repeating data at ever decreasing scales and simply replace them with, as
Roy Lichtenstein called them, small paintings.
And the faux fractals could be small paintings of lozenges and dots, or
thumbprints or cross hatchings or multivalued paper pulp. In a sense we're
exploring the structure that holds up the Hollywood Sign, the things that
live inside the wires.
Here's an excerpt from an amazing 1995 conversation he had with Roy Lichtenstein:
Close: I love how the Benday dots really were content, and
how in that wonderful painting of the magnifying glass the dots are simply
bigger inside the frame of glass
Lichtenstein: I can see it in your work, of course, because
the mark that is supposed to symbolize a highlight or a shadow is itself
a decorative thing; it could be a painting.
Close: Well, I think that's why your work was so important
to me. In fact, when Diane Waldman said that you were conjoining a real
image with an abstract style, that had real urgency for me: the idea that
it was so clearly the marks on the surface at the same time as it was the
image.
