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Close's take-it-or-leave-it approach to the human face was deeply related to the growing interest among his Minimalist peers in sculptural materials set forth as they were: strips of rubber or felt on the floor, cinder blocks, polystyrene or slabs of rusty steel propped together. The paint Close applied was molecule-thin, spritzed on the painstakingly prepared gesso surface with an airbrush, in strict accordance with the grid to which Close enlarged the original photo. It suggested an obsessive involvement on the artist's part, but kept the viewer distant, with nothing sensuous to hook onto--unless you had a thing about freckles and wens. This idea of deadpan, photo-derived "objectivity" was much in the air at the time--a small movement, Photo-Realism, was one of the spin-offs from Pop Art--but nobody took it as far as Close, or with such riveting effects. These are lost in reproduction--the image shrinks back to being just another photo, and its command on your attention (huge, august, frontal, like the head of a Pantocrator from a Byzantine apse) vanishes. Only from the originals can one grasp what Close means when he says, in a catalog interview with curator Storr, that "I wanted to make something that was impersonal and personal, arm's-length and intimate, minimal and maximal, using the least amount of paint possible but providing the greatest amount of information possible."
From black-and-white, Close moved to color, but again in a system-dominated way. Color printing is done with three colors: cyan (a greenish blue), magenta (a purplish red) and yellow. Close took his photo, had color separations made, and then proceeded to render each square of the canvas with each of the colors, successively, exquisitely controlling the amount of each hue per pixel. There was a yellow face, then a blue overlay, and then with the magenta one--presto, full exact color. No room for deviation or correction. Paint-by-numbers raised to the nth degree. It goes so far out in the direction of illusion that it hits abstraction coming back.
At what point does an array of colored squares in a regular grid begin to turn into a recognizable image? The question touches on the mystery of Realist painting--how it is, for instance, that when looking close up at a Velasquez you see a flurry of gray-and-pink spots and streaks, and when you move back a couple of feet, that same patch has become a glistening silver embroidery on rose velvet. All of Close's art recalls his fixation on this effect, the brain seeking illusion in pattern, questing for clues: Close will break a face down into round dabs of oil paint (as in Self-Portrait, 1986), or spots of pastel, or even thickly textured platelets of papier-mache glued on top of one another, looking to extend the ways in which repetitive, grid-organized painting turns into the irresistible semblance of a face. All the time, the surface gets richer and more baroque, a far cry from the uninviting air of the early work.