21st Century Painting
Charlie Clough

Flashback: Fresh off the farm and new in NYC, I stepped into a SOHO gallery and was bowled over by an incredible show of large abstract expressionist work. There was something different about these paintings. They did not work in the ways I expected. Intelligence and history was worked into the process of the paint. Along with the precedent of American type abstraction I saw the glamour, ambition and power of Venetian painting. The color was dramatic and the plasticity of the abstract forms was amazing! They didn't look like ABEX work that I had seen in the galleries or museums, and their freedom inspired and challenged me. Charlie became my new hero. It’s a show I've never forgotten.

How does one make a painting?

What I like most about painting, all kinds of painting, is that it ain’t what it looks like. Not that it’s simply an illusion. I like contradiction, that my things can have an old master look, the look of Abstract Expressionism and a look of shiny smoothness. I like those paradoxes—flatness and its opposite, the way the photo reveals and the paint conceals.

In the end it's not what the painting's about. It's always how you do it. Charlie is all about how you do it. His aesthetic bravery in the face of the cool abstraction that followed the 80's extreme figuration was exemplary. He continued to expand his processes and develop his references. In the 90's his paintings became richer and hotter as the new Soho Artists of the Moment installed boxes, shelves and vitrines to display the goods and services they had purchased in the liquidation stores and cheap boutiques up and down lower Broadway. Charlie continued to evoke the old masters in new ways. His color became bolder and the movement in his work became overtly Venetian less New York School, filled with plasticity and overflowing with form and abundance. It was as if the Scuolo di San Rocco was being channeled into the 1990s through an American painterly sensibility.

I have this personal, Abstract Expressionist way of covering an image with paint, but everything else gets in between that style and the final image. Relationships develop. So it’s not just me alone, painting. I have this conversation with the outer world, which takes place in my imagination.

Hard Choices

Charlie Clough is one of the best painters of his generation. He first garnered attention along with Longo, Schnabel, Salle, Bleckner, Lasker, Reed and Halley in the 1980s. However, Charlie's work was different. He was neither involved in the then hip expressionistic re-figuration movement, nor was he part of the heady neo-geo generation or the abstract mannerists that followed.

Charlie was known as a painter's painter and his work was hard to pigeon hole. He openly engaged in a critical debate with Abstract Expressionism and created new possibilities for painters looking to move the American-type Abstraction forward. This critical legacy is found in the intellectual underpinning of Charlie's practice. He cleverly sidestepped academic issues relating to the practice of painting and historical quotation by reformulating the questions about what abstraction could express, what abstract painting might look like in a media age. He used enamel paints and developed his own painting tools. The tool of choice was something he called a "Big Finger," a device made of a wooden pole with a round pad on the end. Charlie found that he could work distanced from the control and facility of his hand but remain connected to the flow of the work. Like Matisse and his bamboo pole or Pollock and his turkey baster, he lost control deliberately. It was an old solution applied in a new way. Charlie found distance and release. The way he uses paint runs counter to the Greenberg bunch. He explores the possibilities of too much paint. Charlie doesn't stain or place, he hoses. And with the paint he pushes the boundaries of form and space. His practices remind me of Venetian figurative excess translated through an ABEX sensibility. Form and hue explode in puddles and drips. Charlie is no second generation painter. He is making something new of ABEX painting. He gives the "Big Finger" to the over blown art world by creating stronger and more challenging work. I believe the seeds of the next discourse on painting lie in these works.

Charlie also uses color in a way that is foreign to most of the ABEX artists. His use of color is more allied to Matisse’s color theories. Using the deconstructed space detailed by the Cubists Charlie fuses hue with emotion. His chromatic space is not reliant on the grid/surface. Hue is the space and creates a complicated visual interiority in the viewer. There is a physical intensity to his colors and they have the resonance of electronic media applications. On Charlie's web site you can get a taste of the intense color in the jpegs, but to fully appreciate the force behind these hues one must see them in person. The colors evoke a strong physical response.
Matisse set the standard for this emotive declarative color, but American practice prefers structure over hue. This color phobia is rampant in serious discussions of Abstract Expressionism. Modernist color strategy was relinquished by most of the ABEX painters and lost to the mannerist devices and hues of the second-generation painters. Of the ABEX artists Hoffman and Rothko explored this hue based expressionism in difficult and challenging work. Hoffman spoke of the "push pull" of space and thus the emotional experience involved in coming to terms with that space. Their chromatic spaces remain tied to the grid and rest on the surface. Charlie usurps this concept with an explosion of color. Space moves beyond the surface and pushes at the boundaries of the support. It's as if his paintings will leap onto the walls and floors and run into the street. These are not "exterior paintings," nor do they come from 19th Century romanticism experienced from behind the polite viewing window of the canvas support. These paintings demand a physical intimacy that is almost embarrassing in public. It is a 21st Century sort of intimacy, one created by the virtual world of instant communication.

What is real and what is simulation?

In the 1990s Charlie was one of the first artists to understand the importance of computers and the electronic world, and what the coming information deluge would mean to painting. At the gallery the Grand Salon, Charlie began to play with the idea of reproduction. He used his own work, rather than media images to develop the idea of the unique multiple. He would first scan the image, reproduce it, and then manually change the image with paint. Then he would rescan the image and incorporate it into an animation program. Here the images would mutate from original to reproduction back to original then finally to digitized artwork. Hundreds of these small images were looped on an endless, real time program. It's like watching the development of painting through time sequence photography. Many abstract artists today are using the computer to develop their paintings, but Charlie's practice remains unique. He does not give up the distinctions of his hand or vision. He is literally in the process. Most artists allow Photoshop to determine the outcome of the picture. They are bound by the codes inherent in the programs and have only to reproduce the photoshopped image. This sort of painting is the final step in the digitized reproduction rather than the source of artistic process. Charlie has been determined to remain the final program, uploading his sensibility into the machine. He refuses to allow the program the final word on how his image will look. This is beyond digitization. Charlie actually becomes the program itself, and the computer is simply the tool, another "Big Finger." Charlie calls these original works and programs "Display Repros."

Theoretically and practically the Display Repro “advertises” the original and calls into question the relationship of actual to simulation.The qualities and functions of authenticity, illusion and artifice, directness and distance are, likewise, framed. Expressionist conceit is countered by reflexive probity. Subtly but inescapably the tragic quality of the collision of the pathos of reproduction against the hubris of creation permeates the otherwise apparent simple pleasure of the image itself.

It is time for a serious reconsideration of Charlie's accomplishments. His body of work continues to get stronger and his visual ideas have been prescient. The uncompromising richness and emotive power of his work speak of an unknown new territory for painting in the electronic age. I believe Charlie to be an important painter for those of us working to find a way beyond the Post Modern stalemate. His paintings open new ways to deal with the abstract academicism that permeates the galleries. His use of color, material and technology point the way to a new form of expressionism in the 21st Century. I look forward to his next major show in New York. I have no doubt that it will take the Art World by storm.