The Los Angeles-New York Exchange
(excerpt)
Roberta Smith
LACE, Los Angeles, California, 1983, (Catalog © Committee for the Visual Arts, by permission)
(Roberta Smith writes art criticism for the New York Times and Art in America.)

Charles Clough’s endeavor might be characterized as the problem of making paintings in the “age of
mechanical reproduction,” in other words, of reconciling painting to the existence of photography.
Like Reese Williams, Clough uses the photograph, but only as a point of departure; photography
enables him to, quite literally, build on the “foundation” of older art, to have his cake and obliterate it
too. Clough paints over postcards and other art reproductions, photographing and blowing up the
results and then painting on them again. His paintings are essentially, abstract, gestural, and brightly
colored—sparkling whites, blues, pinks, and golds abound. Much of the sparkle comes from the fact
that their surfaces, despite the animated brushwork, have the crispness of a four-color reproduction.
These cool surfaces foil the hot, expressionist brushwork, just as the abstractness is foiled by an
occasional foot, head, or eye peeking through—remnants of, clues to some underlying Delacroix or
Rubens. Likewise, the weird impression that one is actually looking at a blown-up “detail” of an Old
Master painting is overturned when you see that the details of Clough’s fake-real paintings actually are
details of Old Master paintings. Clough’s work bespeaks an admiration of Rubens, DeKooning,
Delacroix—all artists who worked “direct;” but, full of endless ironies and entendres, both visual and
conceptual, it is anything but direct. In its disjunctive layering of time, scale, and technique, it
continually reiterates how photography has altered the way we see and how painting, perversely
adjustable, perseveres.
While Clough literalizes the photograph by dematerializing painting, Nachume Miller, who came to
painting via installation work, takes a more staunchly literalist approach. He works in a muscular,
often monumentally-scaled style which seems to cross Michelangelo with Leger and Bacon, and he
paints on everything from flimsy ginghams and checks, to canvas, to plywood and patterned plaster
relief. His imagery runs and reruns the gamut, usually juxtaposing two or more pictorial conventions:
Modernist abstraction, Gris-like still-life, Leger-like portraiture, or Michelangeloesque figuration. In
contrast to Clough, Miller’s materials often have a worn, distressed look, as if he wants to downplay
painting’s beauty and play up its existence as a common object in a not too cheerful world. While
Clough’s paintings are full of white and light, Miller’s, regardless of the image, are consistently dark,
his colors almost always undercut by black. In this and many other ways, he continually defines an
ambiguous position to painting’s present and its past, grand tradition.