CHUCK CLOSE. INFINITE

Watching Close work is like watching someone patiently solve the world’s largest crossword puzzle. As the painting is created, its elements are combined, acquire a common meaning and syntax, turning the crossword puzzle into a biography.

- Christopher Finch

Legendary portrait painter and master of photorealism, Chuck Close is one of the most influential artists of his generation, famed for his wide-format portraits and innovative painting techniques that have profoundly influenced American culture and the global art community as a whole.

For 50 years of a successful career, Close has revolutionized the world of contemporary art, changing the very concept of portraiture and pushing it to a new level of artistic perception. Experimenting with a variety of techniques - from detailed Polaroid shots and hyperrealistic oil painting to colored mosaics and jacquard tapestries - Close is gradually blurring the lines between photography and painting.

Having begun work in the era of technological renaissance, Close soon abandoned the academic tradition and the expressionist techniques that were fashionable in those days. Achieving unsurpassed mastery of studio photography, he was one of the first to take the concept of photographic realism as the basis of his work in the 1970s. Close developed an algorithm for transferring images to large-scale paintings, while adhering to the technique of abstract hyperrealism: masterly elaborated details, variations in clarity and shades of the palette - always kept a balance between real and fictional images in his oil works.

Briefly, Close’s method can be described as follows: after creating a snapshot, the resulting image is divided into a scale grid, which is then - cell by cell - proportionally transferred to the canvas. As the painting progresses, each cell is filled with strokes of paint similar in shade. The combination of similar colors, interacting, causes the viewer to have the so-called "optical mixing" - a phenomenon in which the eye combines neighboring colors into one shade. Acquaintance with any of Close’s work begins with this process, since the eye works first at the micro level, combining colors into one fragment, and then at the macro level, putting together a mosaic of these fragments. The mosaic gradually, like an abstract kaleidoscope, is being formed into a single image of a human face.

For the rigor and mathematical accuracy of the approach, many critics called Close’s process "scientific." However, the downside of this precision was the unexpected musicality of the grid. Its repetitions create a melodic and measured rhythm, and the color variations are literally a series of chromatic modulations. “I work with the color equivalent of a musical chord, a kind of color chord,” says Close of his compositions.

“The face is a map of a person’s life. There is no need to highlight or emphasize anything - the face itself will tell what kind of person he is and what his life experience was. "- Chuck Close

Close is confident that he succeeded as an artist not despite his problems, but thanks to them. For him, art has become an important way to deal with life’s difficulties. In addition to the ailment that confined him to a wheelchair since 1988, the artist has suffered from prosopagnosia since childhood, a perception disorder that prevents him from remembering people’s faces. According to him, it was the disorder of facial perception that pushed him to paint portraits: having a photographic memory for two-dimensional objects, he turns the faces of people important to him into portraits, thus memorizing them.

In his studio in downtown Manhattan, portraits are everywhere: Kate Moss, Brad Pitt, Lou Reed, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Close himself. The lens of his camera turned out to be movie stars, musicians and top officials of states. All of them note the duality of working with Close, which, on the one hand, is similar to a frank conversation with a close friend, and on the other, remains a formal and rigorous process of creating studio photography. The process of creating a photograph can take several months - from the development of the concept to the approval of the final version, and it takes from 12 to 14 months to create a picture. The result of the work differs from the stereotyped shots of the selfie era: there is no intention to flatter or embellish - every imperfection becomes a unique detail of a biography that tells a true story of a person. The process of creating a portrait, Close says,changes the relationship between the subject and the artist as they watch together how the image is born. Super-realistic stylization only enhances the uniqueness of the personality, and the portrait itself becomes an independent carrier of information.

Chuck Close is honored with the United States National Medal of the Arts and appointed as a member of the Presidential Arts and Humanities Committee. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on the board of leading art organizations. His works have been presented in hundreds of exhibitions and are in the largest private and museum collections around the world, including: Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA); Tate Gallery (London, UK); Metropolitan Museum (New York, USA); Georges Pompidou Center (Paris, France); National Portrait Gallery (London, UK); Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima, Japan); Ludwig Museum (Aachen, Germany); Museum of Contemporary Art (Vienna, Austria).

For the first time in Moscow, a solo exhibition at the Gary Tatintsyan Gallery will present large-scale paintings, mosaics and jacquard tapestries by Chuck Close, most clearly demonstrating the stages of creativity and the stylistic diversity of the artist’s works.