Painterly Photographs (excerpt)
Anthony Bannon
Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C. and Media Study/Buffalo N.Y. (by the author’s
permission) February-May 1980
(Anthony Bannon, currently the director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, was
also the director of the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo and previously wrote criticism for the
Buffalo News.)

Charles Clough’s art is an art of renewal, an extension of replica objects into possibilities for still new
replication. One’s assumptions of how things ought to be, such as predictable, tidy and categorical,
are put asunder. Although the size, whimsy, color and youthful dare-doing of the work has its
decorative pleasures, Clough’s work is not meant for casual attention. Conceptually, an everlasting
quality of his effort is found in its consequences: that Clough goes a long way in the liberation of
photography and painting from their cubbyholes. While creating a generation of commercial materials,
Clough also makes homage to the very history of art from which he emerges. The range of his work,
its incorporation of diverse image objects, structures and references, suggests a love affair with the
whole of life and those things which life makes—its culture, whether mundane or lofty.
Starting with a sexually enlivened fascination with the human figure and its presentational
focus—found in eyes and genitals—Clough creates ragged body or X-shaped signatures of process,
building his shapes from photo-mechanical reproductions of artists he admires, books and popular
images he enjoys and replicas of his own previous work. What we see, then, interrupted at various
stages in his work’s generative possibilities, is an assay of one medium’s replicational potential into
another. Upon the initial collage, Clough paints over in a free-handed, expressive manner derived, he
has said, from “de Kooning’s hands and Johns’ head, alignment with Pollock’s passion.” Now
photographing aspects of the piece and reassembling those photographs into another collage, Clough’s
assemblies are distanced by the loss of painterly resolution, yet boosted by the sheen of the
photographic surface. They are unspecified amalgams of media, haunted by the brush of their origin
while declaring the photo-chemistry of their presence.
The final irony of these “Paint Creatures” (“P.C.” as he calls them) is the presence of eyes, an artist’s
trademark, peering from the work’s original surface, looking out at the viewer as the viewer ponders
in. The creature’s genitals, also from the original surface, signal the work’s generative potential, as it
moves from large board assemblies, through complex collage, to posterization or isolation in book
form and into still additional additive collaging.