Clough’s abstractions are refreshingly direct
Richard Huntington
Buffalo News, Friday March 4, 1988 (by permission)
(Richard Huntington is a painter who also writes art criticism for the Buffalo News and other
publications.)

Charles Clough’s new gestural abstractions at Nina Freudenheim Gallery are extraordinary paintings,
no doubt. But what are we to think about them, to feel about them? They seem to me to be brilliant
and happy contradictions, heroic and sappy at the time, some unimaginable meeting of
transcendentalism and a Pepsi commercial.
Clough’s energetic blots and smears are nominally indebted to Jackson Pollock’s great labyrinths of
thrown and dripped paint. (Clough, as a former Buffalonian who spent many of his college days at the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, has often expressed his great fondness for the abstract expressionists
generally.) But he cleverly ducks the standard expressionistic implications of an art made by such
extreme painterly methods. He strips his art of any remnant of apocalyptic vision and Pollock’s dark
Jungian refrain is replaced by something like a Dizzy Gillespie riff.
Amazingly, given the tenor of these post-modern times, Clough is unabashedly bright and
unapologetically jolly. He makes what would seem to be an impossible kind of art in the
‘80s—painting entirely angst-free, without a note of bleating irony or self-congratulatory media
mimicry. He doesn’t analyze, philosophize or sound the horn of artistic self-pity.
The paintings—inevitably, I think—are uneven. Clough tries to set off such subtle pictorial triggers
that he must have a time of it separating the out-and-out decorative paintings from the not-quite
decorative paintings. He often is on the verge of bombast or settling for a brilliant display of painterly
gimmickry. And when all fails, he resorts to “solving” a picture in a conventional abstract way.
But all this is part of the risk that Clough takes to make some very fine paintings. He has systematized
his his painterly devices so that they become something like neutral tools rather than expressive
devices. With his “effects” all in hand, he can walk the line between structure and randomness and
between flatness and illusion with a phenomenal ease.
Often he toys with familiar abstract structures but seldom lets them dominate. And he has a beguiling
way of unobtrusively muting the heroic implications of flung paint, pouring and blotting as though
Pollock never existed.
Look at “Lilydale.” In this big vertical painting a great red blob drifts downward, leaving in its wake a
colossal smear of pink and orange and yellow that suggest half-formed spheres hurtling through some
sweetly-colored cosmic space. Two orange tendrils of paint reach downward from this delicious
smear and at once mark off miles of illusionistic space within retreating blue “sky.” Blurred globes,
the color of unripe grapefruit, invade from the left without giving so much as a shudder to the
exquisite balance of the drama at the center.
Clough so cannily measures out his effects that we seem to get the whole emotional story at a gulp.
Nothing appears to be “behind” a Clough, no layer of meaning, no hidden message of universal
scope. He demands nothing, and by not demanding we are invited to act.
The brilliantly colored “Pierre,” so Miro-like in character, purposely keeps Miro’s multi-layered wit at
arms length. The interaction of shape and color and the potential metaphoric meaning of gyrating
blobs are cunningly denied.
Clough has done what few painters can, or are willing to do, today—give abstract painting a direct
voice, unencumbered by the double shuffle of appropriation and the obviousness of historical parody.