REVIEWS 1998-1999

The New York Times
Friday November 6,1998
Ken Johnson
Charles Clough, Tricia Collins, 83 Grand Street, (212) 226-1861 (through Nov 14).
Whether he means to parody or honor Abstract Expressionism, Mr. Clough’s densely painterly enamel abstractions are attractively lush. Eight-inch swaths of striated, Disney-colored paint create a loosely Cubist structure and a splashy psychedelic turbulence. Also on view are some modest sculptures in the form of minimally altered rocks or pieces of wood, a computerized movie of painterly transformations and some nature photographs.

Art in America
February 1999
Carol Kino
For his fourth show at this gallery, Charles Clough showed six large abstract paintings. In Metron, a mélange of colorful paint smears creates a sense of chaos, while Delubrum positions bright swaths of color against a black ground to create the illusion of deep space. As ever, these paintings were so lushly textured and vividly hued that they could easily be viewed as a simple, passionate bid to reanimate Abstract Expressionism. Yet this time, Clough showed them alongside other work—sculptures, photographs and a computer piece—that deftly highlighted their more thoughtful underpinings.
Some of the most interesting pieces here were five sculptures, each of which marries some untouched natural object, like driftwood or rock, with an artfully crafted base. In Boreas, a fragment of sparking anorthosite sits on a wood plinth whose contours demurely parody the rock’s shape. For Ajax, a smooth piece of brownish mottled quartzite is positioned on a rectangular block of wood, oddly echoing Brancusi. Benedict presents a knotty piece of manzanita held upright in a vise. Most of these pieces, which stood on pedestals, were displayed in the gallery’s smaller second room; seen through the open doorway, they gave the show a curiously elegant, modernist look.
The computer piece seemed to underline the more conceptual aspects of Clough’s work. To create it, he overpainted 1,029 copies of a postcard reproduced to advertise his Web site. These different images were scanned and made into a montage in which all of them flip by (in this case on an iMac) in the space of two minutes. Watching the changing marks circulate over a a steady blue and yellow ground, as the computer gently hums, it’s as if the distanced cosmological perspective that often seems to animate Clough’s paintings had whirred into life. The postcards, piled in a vitrine, as well as the original painting, were displayed like artifacts nearby.
Some paired photographs of leaves, rocks and trees, which hung among the sculptures, were less successful. They were matted side by side, with the viewer’s eyes expected to do the work of a stereoscope; unfortunately, perhaps because one is continually distracted by reflections on the glass, it’s next to impossible to squint these images into three-dimensionality. Still, this didn’t dilute the overall impact of the show, whose constant push-pull between nature vs. artifice and primitivism vs. calculation served to underline the selfsame qualities that energize Clough’s abstraction.

Artnet Magazine 02.02.99
Charles Clough
by Max Henry
The painter Charles Clough is best known for high-gloss expressionist paintings that elevate bravura brushstrokes to technicolor heights. In his exhibition last fall in New York, aptly titled “More Is Never Enough,” Clough augmented the selection of seven new paintings with a group of five sculptures, ten pairs of stereographic photographs and a digitized movie made of 1,029 individual postcard-sized finger paintings. The installation suggests that the artist, like so many of his colleagues who came of age in the late 1970s, is a conceptualist at heart.
In place of the brush and other typical painter's tools, Clough uses an instrument he calls the “Big Finger,” a large balloon-like contraption that he invented to spread poured house enamel on masonite into broad gestural constellations. Each of these works measures about four by five feet. Their slick shiny surfaces are distinguished by their strokes and individual pools of color, and their frenetic compositions compel the viewer to take pause with each panel. Not since Hans Hofmann has an abstract expressionist been able to compose so well with the entire palette.
Think of the manic energy of a Jackson Pollock with the intellectual gumption of British painter Howard Hodgkin and you'll get what Clough is about. With obtuse titles such as Bevatron (a proton accelerator), Cataclasis (a metamorphic fracture and rotation in the grains of rock), or the Welsh word Sunket (which literally means "something"), the artist suggests a geological point of view. Would that be prehistoric, or just massive? Or maybe Clough is a geology buff (he is). The sculptures are found stones placed on carefully designed wood pedestals. It's impossible not to consider the stones as mirrors of the gestures in his paintings. In the catalogue accompanying the show, he writes of how “irresistible” he finds “the thrust and endurance of geology's lifeless resistance.” Others will recall Brassaï's brilliant photographs from the 1930s of “unconscious sculptures,” and the 1,000-year-old “self-portraits of nature” seen in an exhibition in the summer of 1996 of Chinese Scholars’ Rocks at the Asia Society Galleries in New York.
Clough's photographs seem to be simple color snapshots, slightly varied views of the same stone or trunk or bough butted side by side. Printed instructions in the gallery tell the viewer to stare at the pictures with crossed eyes, thus creating a 3-D effect. Indeed, it works rather well, considering. The movie is literally a “moving picture,” with 1,029 variegating finger-painted images projected on a computer screen within a two-minute continuum. The thing is both a compressed digital replica of all those little paintings, while at the same time providing an irascible palette, a spontaneous combustion and encyclopedic knowledge that is fitting for the cyclonic whirligig of the Internet.