Edition: U.S. / Global

ART REVIEW; Playful Portraits Conveying Enigmatic Messages

Published: February 27, 1998

There aren't many living American painters whose retrospectives would generate the interest that Chuck Close's show at the Museum of Modern Art has already done. Partly it's because a taste for his work is so easily acquired; never mind that he sticks to the often unloved category of portraiture. After all, who can deny the cool, snappy, absurd allure of those first giant black-and-white paintings, like mug shots on the scale of highway billboards? They turn out to have lost almost none of their shock value after 30 years.

And what's not to like about the zippy new paintings, playful, cartoonish tours de force of Pointillist illusionism, their colored faces miraculously cohering out of dozens of jostling X's, O's, hot dog and doughnut shapes, fitted into grids?

Within the confines he has set for himself, in other words, Mr. Close has remained an artist of obvious and steady gifts, an articulate painter with real esthetic panache. His dogged inclination to pursue pretty much a single idea -- a habit and focus that are not exceptional -- combines with a large technical facility and an endearing sense of wonderment. For like everyone else, Mr. Close seems to find it endlessly amazing that rubbing colored dirt onto a canvas can somehow summon up a face. And his pictures, each one patiently, painstakingly made during many months, are thus like magic tricks performed over and over.

Does this mean his art is repetitious? Even as cleverly and subtly installed as it is here to stress variety, the Modern's exhibition, with 90 works, is bound to raise the question whether Mr. Close is one of those artists best seen in smaller quantities.

Maybe he is, but I wonder why we don't complain that Cezanne painted Mont Ste.-Victoire too much or that Morandi stuck to bottles. My point isn't that Mr. Close is Cezanne, but that there may be something special about portraits, as against landscapes or still lifes: we don't feel we need to know what was in Morandi's bottles to grasp his pictures, or to visit the south of France to understand Cezanne's landscapes. Yet often we fear we're missing crucial information unless we know about the life of a person in a portrait. Sargent's Madame X or Rembrandt's Jacob Trip and Margaretha de Geer are exceptions precisely because they are made into universal types: expressive symbols of vanity and ancient wisdom.

Mr. Close's portraits are conspicuously, intentionally inexpressive. He called the first ones heads, instead of portraits, then came to realize and embrace the fact that his works register as portraits anyway, though they are portraits of a peculiar species.

''When I do a portrait,'' he has said, ''I'm trying to present it flat-footedly, without editorial comment, although information about character is there anyway, if people want to look for it. I like to say that if a person laughs, the laugh lines show; if the person frowns, the brow is furrowed. Faces are road maps of a life.''

Not really. Look at his own recent self-portrait, a three-quarter view of his head, cropped tight, eyes glaring, a cross between Che Guevara and Frank Langella. It's vivid painting, but if we didn't recognize Mr. Close, how might we judge the person in the picture? A mug shot image doesn't tell us much at all, despite our assumptions to the contrary, and if there is a sense of repetitiousness about these self-consciously deadpan images, it may in fact have to do with how, cumulatively, they frustrate our subconscious expectations of, and desires for, human transparency. We come to feel there is something lacking in the art, though it is really in us.

Mr. Close has repeatedly made clear that, from his perspective at least, his faces always begin as more or less neutral vehicles for fundamentally formal exercises, which is why he sometimes recycles them: to stress their basic mechanical, as against biographical or psychological, value. His clinical detachment can bring to mind Jasper Johns; the allover, equal distribution of attention across his picture surfaces can suggest Pollock.

Where this leaves his work in the spectrum of new art is a constant problem. It's not that he doesn't fit anywhere but that he seems to fit almost everywhere, a fact that has turned him into something of a policeman of his own reputation, politely cautioning those who might try to pigeonhole him as, say, a Pop artist or (heaven forbid) a Photo-Realist.

He tends to stress his roots, rightly, in Minimalism and Process Art, and cites Willem de Kooning and Ad Reinhardt as particular influences. Reinhardt's all-black abstractions evidently demonstrated to him how an artist could benefit from self-imposed restrictions: how making the choice not to do something could become a positive decision. This is Mr. Close's mantra.

So he belongs in the pool of postwar figurative painters whose works are, to one degree or another, conceptual or ''abstract'': painters like Gerhard Richter and Malcolm Morley, who, like him, use photographs, or, among Americans, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and even Wayne Thiebaud, specialists at a certain laconic registration. Mr. Thiebaud's description of ''seeing a stranger in some place like an air terminal for the first time: you look at him, you notice his shoes, his suit, the pin in his lapel, but you don't have any particular feeling about him'' is like the alien effect of Mr. Close's faces, when you don't know who they are.

The result of his approach is obviously to shift much of the expressive burden onto materials and touch. This means the work sometimes achieves only a technical fascination, like the optical illustrations in Scientific American he has said he admires. But several of the most affecting pictures in the show also turn out to be the most eccentrically made: the faces built out of complex and dense arrangements of paper pulp pads that look like potato chips, which in ''Jud'' give the impression of a sagging mass of flesh.

Or ''Fanny,'' a giant photolike portrait made, astonishingly, from thousands of Mr. Close's fingerprints -- flesh painting flesh -- a witty virtuoso twist on the childhood practice of finger painting, in this case for a portrait of the artist's grandmother-in-law. More important, it is also an oddly moving picture because of the acute sense of these fingerprints as ghostly residue of the painter's presence, like snail marks in the sand.

Some of the latest paintings are memorable for other reasons. They simulate the woozy effect of looking through pebbled glass: ''Roy II,'' in which the edges of the profile seem almost to evaporate; ''Paul III,'' a giant close-up cropped so tightly that the face spills across the whole canvas and becomes a bubbling pink-yellow-chartreuse ocean.

Mr. Close's pictures, in their often curious execution, clearly invite unusual scrutiny. You find yourself squinting at the newest paintings to make their jangling forms magically snap into focus, or nosing up to the first portraits to see Mr. Close's touch in their photolike imagery.

Photolike but never truly mechanical: one of the virtues of this show is to allow us to see that the early and recent works are not, at heart, as different as people tend to think. Look at the ears in the black-and-white portrait of Richard Serra from 1969, which are no more precisely drawn than the ones in Mr. Close's 1991 black-and-white self-portrait.

The perception of a difference, I think, has partly to do with the common misconception that visible brush strokes automatically denote emotion; hence, the recent pictures are more emotional, less mechanical. But why should this be so? The colors haven't even really changed; it's just that the contrasts among them are more visible because the organizing grids are bigger.

The other reason people tend to divide Mr. Close's art into early and late periods is, of course, because a decade ago, when a spinal artery suddenly collapsed, he was left nearly paralyzed. The assumption is that the works done since then, being amazing triumphs of determination, express a newfound joy and (paradoxical) freedom.

There's something actually distasteful and patronizing about the stress that's often put on his private life by so many writers, as if his art needed special pleading. The fact is that the enlarged grids, funny shapes and Op-like arrangements of color began to appear in the work before his setback -- see ''Cindy'' or ''Lucas II'' in the show -- so that what's remarkable about Mr. Close's achievement in the face of his disaster was how little it altered his course.

It's a funny thing that we seem to demand stylistic evolution, if not a variety of subject matter, of our modern visual artists; but we don't necessarily demand the same degree of change of, say, composers. This probably has something to do with the nature of artist retrospectives, which bring together whole careers, treating them as if they should be narratives, a format whose distorting effects we too easily overlook.

For years, we have been gazing into Mr. Close's clever faces, which have been staring absently back at us, maddeningly noncommittal. At 57, having stayed the course through several raucous decades of change in art, he has ended up, surprisingly enough, as a pretty good spokesman for this moment.

''Chuck Close'' remains on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, Manhattan, through May 26, traveling to Chicago in June, Washington in October and Seattle in February 1999. Its principal sponsors are Michael and Judy Ovitz.

Photos: Articulate and vivid painting: ''Self-Portrait'' (1997), by Chuck Close, from a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. (Ellen Page Wilson/Pace Wildenstein)(pg. E33); Mr. Close's ''Robert/104, 072,'' from 1973-74, at the Modern. (Kate Keller/Museum of Modern Art); ''Fanny/Fingerpainting,'' a 1985 portrait by Chuck Close. (National Gallery of Art, Washington)(pg. E35)