chuck close reviews and comments

Chuck Close Reviews Close is fascinated by how reality at a third remove can seem so real. He is in love with a photograph's lack of authenticity and yet determined to control it. Year after year he repeats his formal gesture, like Freud's child tossing a ball over and over to confront a sense of loss. He has lost the comfort of art's humanity and his own claim to genius, and again and again he replaces it with his outsize talent. Is this narrowness boring? Well, yes. I never think of Close when I name artists I like the most, and I guess I never fully accept him. Numbed by almost a hundred of his works, I may never have gone through so large a retrospective so fast. Twice. The narrowness, though, is precisely what I like about him. It puts his subject's humanity and artistic genius through the wringer, and they emerge on the other side of a work of art. Remember those magazine columns of "mathematical diversions"? In a parody, Veronica Geng wrote that "the trick is ridiculously easy to understand once it's understood." Apparently not for Close. He is the magician who tired his audience long ago but can never get over his own amazement. -John Haber, New York “……one of the most important artists alive.” - Damon Sims, Cleveland.com Close's works sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars and are shown all over the world. Twenty years after he almost died, he says he's one of the happiest artists you'll ever meet."There is no artist alive, working today, who gets more pleasure day in and day out, year in and year out, than I do. Period. None," Close said. "I know there is no man or woman who gets more pleasure than I do."