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Above all, there is no analysis of character. We feel we learn something about Rembrandt from looking at the late self-portraits. About Close's sitters, one learns nothing—except that they have more pores than the travertine of the Colosseum. One's curiosity about who they may be is stifled by Close's relentlessly forensic approach. The images verify without interpreting; each face is as naked as a body, a piece of unveiled skin with orifices. It is neither blank nor expressive, but simply there—a topographical essay, like a fulsomely detailed map that has somehow acquired the gratuitousness of art. One is sharply reminded, after a little time in this show, that Close's real subject is not people: the heads, as Art Historian Martin Friedman points out in his catalogue essay, are "portraits of photographs," and their aggregation of detail forces us to reflect on process—how they were made, why they need to carry so much information. They are conceptual art, of a kind: Idea before Painting. What other realist painter comes near this minimalist harshness? Close's images pay absolute homage to the power of an overriding system; they might have been done on autopilot.
The applications of this system vary a good deal. Sometimes the grid of Close's preliminary studies is large in relation to the scale of the image; it turns into big programmed dots that define the face tonally, without giving much information about it at all. "On that scale," Close points out, "a dot just can't be specific, it can't stand for individual hairs, it has to be very general." In the largest studies, the face may almost vanish in the welter of information, becoming ungraspable, as the original photograph never was. In between there are many thresholds of transition, where the changes of size alter the whole relationship, within the image, of photography (the source) to painting (the product). Sometimes, more recently, Close seems to abandon the grid altogether, transforming his standard face of Philip Glass into an almost rococo swirl of repeated fingerprints impressed on the canvas from an ink pad: a literal parody, if ever there was one, of the "sense of touch" in traditional painting. But always he seems to be after a kind of minimalist nirvana where, as he puts it, "every square inch was physically the same, where there was no area of more beautiful brushing or virtuoso art marks."
In the process, Close has produced an unattractive art of striking intelligence. "If you do your job right, if you do it one bit at a time, one piece of information at a time, you can end up with something that has emotional impact without having to resort to emotional gestures," he maintains. "Human heads are things people care about. You can't mess around with them—but I'm interested in being flat-footed about it." And in this flat-footed way, Close has done more to redefine the limits of portraiture than any other painter of his generation.
—By Robert Hughes