Clough Exhibits Flair For Off-the-Wall Art
Hal Crowther
Review, Buffalo Evening News
August 4, 1976
(Hal Crowther wrote art criticism for the Buffalo News in the 1970s.)

If these walls could talk” is a poetic conceit that predates Virgil, at least. If the walls of Hallwalls could
talk, they wouldn’t to clods and laymen. They’ve been part and parcel of so much art and known so
many aesthetic metamorphoses they might speak with Olympian arrogance, like Salvador Dali. But
they talk to Charlie Clough.
In the recent Hallwalls group show “Noise,” marked by much intimacy with the walls, Clough was
the most inventively intimate. Now he’s back with some of those same protean bricks, and all the
walls of Hallwalls at his disposal.
“I just love to paint walls” said Clough, motioning at his heroic Primal Ooze, which looks like that
famous garage wall in Chicago after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. “I’ll paint one outdoors when I
can get one, but it’s not often they give me a chance.”
“I Wear the Wall,” offers no opening to pigeonhole Clough as a painter, a photographer or sculptorly
creator of assemblages and collages.
His methods are as multifarious as his ideas. He rifles hobby shops and five-and-dimes for objects
that go to the wall. He paints on the wall, photographs it, covers the wall with its own photograph and
then alters both of them with more paint
Clough doesn’t shrink from the most obscure and personal allusions. His work is a web of
mysterious relationships and verbal and visual puns. He plays games, hoping by the deployment of
his wallpieces to make the viewer walk in a figure eight pattern that’s also the symbol for infinity.
It follows that this smallish artist with a larg-ish mustache has a mind like a tennis ball, bouncing from
wall to beloved wall. It shuffles abstractions like “reality and illusion” with riverboat dexterity. Each
concept is clear in itself, until it explodes in a dozen directions.
Charlie’s not easy to follow. The question, though, is whether it’s worth it to try. I’d say it is.
Many of the pieces that he calls drawings are simple metaphors between an image or an object, like a
model Zeppelin half, and a color. Some work better than others. But there are a couple of Clough’s
pieces that are just damnably and admirably clever, sweet inspirations plucked whole from his
dizzying stream of consciousness.
Dragon, a monster assembled from consecutive photographs of a roadcut on Amherst Street, is a jewel
of wit and observation. Primal Ooze or The Great Red Wall is an hour’s viewing, a spreading red
stain thick with tiny toy turtles and crabs, swamp cat-tails, sectioned spray cans and something that
looks like a plastic fetus.
Reality and illusion gets a vigorous workout. Clough wears the walls through August 14 (1976).