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Close, when a student at Yale, was enraptured by the work of the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning: he loved his color and luscious paint surface, while realizing that they couldn't possibly be imitated. Imitating de Kooning was the bane of student existence: no originality could come of it. But Close, in his ruminative way, hankered after the paradise of the senses that de Kooning's touch represented, and it surfaces in the work that he had begun to do just before his paralysis in 1989 and was able to develop after his partial recovery. The dots and pixels become thick-painted squares, with highly colored microforms--lozenges, doughnuts, figure-eights--tossing around in them. The image of the head coarsens and blurs, breaks off at some edges, acquires a mysterious density. It's like looking at someone through ripple glass, and it produces striking results--as in Roy II, 1994, a portrait of the painter Roy Lichtenstein, whose profile (owing to the constraints of Close's grid) hardens into the likeness of Dick Tracy while keeping a beautiful fluidity of surface. Finally, Close has been able to get some vibrancy into the results of his system: the work of the imagination has been moved up from background to foreground, from the planning of the image to its actual execution. Some artists get stuck in their style as they age. Others get wilder; they are among the lucky ones, and this show makes it clear that Close is one of them.