translated by Giorgina Arcuri

“Photographs”,  held on 17th May 2008 by Phillips de Pury & Co. London auction house, realized takings equal to 1,325,835 pounds. An interesting sale offering some of the most important names of historical and contemporary photography: Man Ray, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Irving Penn, but also Helmut Newton, David LaChapelle, Cindy Sherman and Andres Serrano.
The Top-Price of the London auction was lot 321 “Potraits London (F. Bacon)/Paris/Nairobi” by American artist Peter Beard, which from an estimate of 40-60 thousand pounds, totalled 156,500 pounds. However, given that our Magazine has already dealt with this photographer who was “Sick for Africa” (see article: Peter Beard, adventurer for the love of Africa, achieves Top-Price at Phillips New York), for this week rather than describing the lot that achieved the highest price at auction, we will talk about a work of great artistic beauty. It is “Kate, 2007” by USA artist Chuck Close from the Adamson Gallery of Washington D.C., which from an estimate of 50-70 thousand pounds, sold for 66,500 pounds. A work of extraordinary artistic quality that portrays English model Kate Moss, inspiring muse for Close but also for other great contemporary photographers. Indeed, when he met Kate Moss he said: “She stood before me without combing her hair nor ever looking at herself in the mirror”; while the famous star of international catwalks said: “I have already had enough pretty portraits of myself. Then he looked at me with a certain complicity as he knew that he was doing another one of me”.
The oeuvre of Chuck Close, who is as famous in his homeland (he was born in 1940 in Monroe) as much as he is almost unknown, at least to the general public, in Italy, is generally compared by the critics to American Photorealism, but his art has wider influences: while his formation took place between the sixties and seventies, marked in America by the experiences of Pop Art and Minimal Art, Close himself recognizes the importance for his work of the European masters of the past, from Rembrandt to Caravaggio, from Giotto to Vermeer.
Despite the wide range of pictorial references, he is however an artist who moves within a rigid intellectual scheme: he only does portraits, and never on commission, always of large dimensions and with a frontal layout. Indeed, from the beginning of his career to the end of the seventies, Chuck Close seems to have had few doubts in the choice of his subjects, preferring immediately portraits, that is the crude and almost Cartesian analysis of the person, an actual brand mark of Close.
Beyond the great variety of techniques that he tries out, the procedure that leads to the execution of his work is always the same. Close starts by “capturing” the image of the subject through a Polaroid and goes on to “square off” the image, achieving an enlarged image that is divided into hundreds of squares. The artist tries to increase the distance between the spectator and the work; the squares, similar to the patches of a mosaic, are recomposed to form a human face. And this tension between two-dimensionality and three-dimensional reality represents the most interesting element of Close’s artistic methodology, as well as the mainstay of his poetics: as he explains himself, “I am fascinated by the constant game between artificial and real, between the flatness of the surface and the plasticity of the portrayed face”.
Chuck Close’s interest, rather than being directed at the subject that is being represented, is towards the work itself, in the procedures that lead to completing the work and the great strength of the artist’s work lies in this exhausting process: acting as a filter between the subject and his imagination, he creates cold and distant portraits, void of useless tinsels, very meticulous in the details, which are dominated by the love for physiognomy rather than the intent to show the model’s personality. The face of relatives, friends and even his own represent a “map” of the person portrayed, who does not usually have a marked expressive impetus. While the subjects’ character and past are usually described by the marks and lines left on their faces by the passing of time.