Chuck Close Portraits in the Context of Photorealism

Abstract

Photorealism developed in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a movement against Abstract Expressionism and Minimalist art. The photorealist movement took its inspiration and source material from photography, which would provide light or texture details that the artist could use. Photorealism is considered to be a type of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic mediums, in which an attempt is made to realistically reproduce the image in another medium by examining a photograph. Tjalf Sparnaay, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, Richard Estes, Ron Mueck and Duane Hanson are among the photorealist artists who reproduce reality through photography. The work of the American artist Chuck Close (1940-2021) also emerged in the context of photorealism in the 1960s and was originally described as such. Later, Close's work associated him not only with photorealism but also with conceptual art. The artist used the airbrush technique in his early works, thus avoiding brush marks and personal style as an expression of the artist. In these works, Close reflected all the details of the photograph in his paintings. Almost like a printing press, he created his works by bringing the colors together as dots, respectively. Confined to a wheelchair after his stroke and intensive treatment in 1988, the artist continued to paint by physically adapting his workshop and work tools to his new condition, and returning to the portrait theme, though not as detailed as before. What takes Chuck Close beyond the photorealist movement is his interest in the pixelization of the image, unlike his early work. Here, Close created visual illusions between the whole and parts of his paintings, which he divided into grids by widening the spacing between the minimum elements of the image. Thus, portraits gained a new vitality and a new dimension like mosaics. The tonal continuity of the photographic image is like the optical reconstructed version of both Seurat's paintings and the pointillist works in general. While the theme of Chuck Close's portraits has remained constant since the 1960s, the technical applications of materials have varied, including the use of watercolor, acrylic, pulp, airbrush, brushes and fingerprints. Chuck Close remains a great figure of his time, combining the photography-painting relationship with his individual history.