MORE IS NEVER ENOUGH, my fifty-third solo exhibition, was presented by Tricia Collins Contemporary Art, October 22 through November 15, 1998, and included six paintings, five sculptures, three photographic stereo pairs, a movie, consisting of a base painting, 1,029 over-painted postcards of that base, a Director Shockwave file of the movie on CD-ROM, and a Web site: www.clufff.com.
The Paintings:
Certain structural conventions...evident affirmative critique...ratios of sameness and difference...poverty, glamour and economy...righteous wonder...turbulent transformation...the justice of the palette...the spectrum as the universe...horrible hubris pure...ever-lurking nothingness...streaming, pooling goo...
The paintings were made in 1998 and are enamel on masonite, approximately four feet tall by five feet across.
The Sticks and Stones:
My paintings are the major constituent of my interior—studio practise, which is dialectically countered by my exterior—outdoor reflection, which I characterize (with the slightest irony) as gnarly suspense. I find many naturally occurring color/textures to be irresistible and the dangle and stretch of botany's reproductive imperative and the thrust and endurance of geology's lifeless resistance necessitates my testimonial response.
So it is that when the well-shaped stick or stone comes into reach I put it in my bag. Most often those well-shaped elements refuse to budge, in which case my snare is my camera.
The Photographs:
The photographs are pairs of 6 x 4 inch C-prints chosen by Tricia Collins for this exhibition.
Viewing Instructions: Look at the pair of images. Choose any sharply defined, conspicuous feature in the center of each frame. Slowly cross your eyes. Notice the features coming together. When they come together lock the images by registering the superimposed features. Hold the locked position and notice, three frames—one to the left, one to the right and one in the center. Concentrate on the center image, sharpen your focus and adjust it as you peruse the image and you will observe the illusion of three-dimensional space.
The Movie:
During the early 1970s I studied with the American independent filmakers, Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits, at SUNY/Buffalo. This underlies my concern for frame-to-frame relationships, evident in this, my first realization of “all-over...again and again” which literalizes (a portion of) the oeuvre as a succession of images, more or less similar.
Tinnitus, (illustrated on the cover) is the image used to produce a 3 1/2 x
5 1/2 inch postcard which provided the “under-work” for the 1,029 “color-corrected”, repainted frames which constitute the movie, Tinnitus, produced in the software application, Director and presented on CD-ROM.
—C.C., 21 September 1998

Exhibition Catalog Essay
Charles A. Riley II PhD
“Quality is real and has a source. At every moment a new and unexpected quality can arise within a human action—and just as quickly it can be lost, found, and lost again. Still the hidden source remains. Quality is sacred, but it is always in danger.” —Peter Brook, Threads of Time.
The images of the seven wickedly wonderful enamel-on-masonite paintings in this exhibition are gracefully morphing into one another on the computer screen in a dance of color and gesture reminiscent of the time-lapse clips of storm clouds gathering, bursting and giving way to windswept blue sky and blooming flowers. Brief glimpses of the striations of hot and cool tones in the lower left corner of Bevatron are succeeded by the marbling effect in Cataclasis and then the fascinating gaps in a strong downward cascade of blue and white in Delubrum. As Legong captures the screen, with its gorgeous choral masses of red, blue and white, the image is punctuated by a moment in the central foreground that has all the drama and turbulence of a seascape by Marsden Hartley, with a nod to the lyric brush of Milton Avery. Then Metron arrives with its vaguely Chinese play of black and white at the very center, capped by a feathery trill of blues and whites above. Out of that darkness breaks Ruritania, all grace and lightness, its billowing yellows and golds holding the corner diagonally opposed to a dark cloud above and giving birth to the molten reds and oranges at the center of Sunket. While the movie (heavily influenced by Clough's mentors Hollis Frampton and Paul Sharits) lasts it presents a breathtaking fireworks display of virtuoso colorism and painting, and leaves us to seize the opportunity for quieter contemplation of those passages in paint or compositional issues that individual works afford, in the abundance that is typical of the studio of Charles Clough.
Working in sets and sequences of paintings that maintain a constant ratio through varying scale (another film emerges from 1,029 “color corrected” paintings on a postcard image of a large-scale painting entitled Tinnitus), Clough inundates a source image in fearless chromaticism and bold gestures that invite comparison with two important exhibitions running concurrently with his: Delacroix and Pollock. As the artist points out, “The allover composition of Pollock colonized my mind in a big way, leading to my own reflections on hierarchy and nonhierarchical systems as well as metaphors for inclusiveness. Each image is composed, allover and again and again, and through time a chain of these images creates a tunnel.” If you proceed past the impact of the vigorous color and rapid flinging of the paint, you realize that there is a recession deep into a center that is Clough's signature compositional device. The layers of overpainting open at moments on windows of marbling or intricate intersections of strokes of the huge “fingers” (circular pads on sticks that he paints with-remember Pollock's two-by-fours in Blue Poles) or even bare brown masonite underneath (recalling Vuillard's ground). These brief openings are similar to the windows in the opaque fields of color in a late Gorky painting, and they turn our attention to another element in Clough’s work that almost comes at a surprise. “It's the drawing that distinguishes them. I'm always amazed that people don't pick up on the drawing that's at the edge of the colors, the stroke that articulates areas, whether flung as with Pollock or creating rhymed arabesques in the way that Delacroix and Titian did. Even the contours in the stereoscopic photographs create edges that pop, a vivid cut edge,” the artist comments. For Clough, the tough, workmanlike character of signpainter's enamel on board goes hand in hand with Pollock's use of the materials at hand: “Just as Art Brut and Arte Povera focused on common materials, there is something in Pollock too that is tremendously economical, efficient, direct. If you think of the complex industrial processes and difficult materials involved in making a car, a painting is remarkably economical. It simply applies the materials at hand.”
Be that as it may, the tunnel voyage back through a dense luxuriance of paintings, sculptures, photographs and computer-based films reminds us that Charles Clough has been on the art world radar since 1974, when he was instrumental in the rise of Hallwalls in Buffalo, followed by more than 50 exhibitions in North America and Europe. The current exhibition is a tour de force with a center that holds—an art-historically informed compositional logic of drawing and painting—even as the attractions of multi-media tug in every direction. Once you set what Clough calls the “turbulent transformation” in motion, the process will take you further into what we now call “art” than you are likely to have gone before.