Charles Clough at Scott Hanson (review)
Holland Cotter
Art in America (by the author’s and editor’s permission)
June 1988
(Holland Cotter writes art criticism for the New York Times, Art in America and other publications.)

Charles Clough was, along with Robert Longo, one of the founders of Buffalo’s Hallwalls in 1974,
and while his early paintings evidenced the pull between esthetic engagement and distancing that
marked the work of his colleagues, they never seemed geared to take a hard-line critical route. A
Clough piece from the early ‘80s would, for example, typically consist of photo enlargement of a
“classic” work (Manet, say, or a de Kooning, to name two artists with whom Clough felt particular
rapport) which he would use as a ground for his own expressionist overpainting. He then cut up and
collaged the new painting and photographed it, only to begin the whole paint-and-cut manipulative
process of rebellion and respect over again for a second and final time.
The results were arresting but sometimes unconvincing—conceptually rich but formally effortful and
overwrought. Clough’s recent work, in his fourth solo New York show, made a far stronger
statement by doing away with the photographic component altogether and concentrating on almost
preposterously painterly painting. The pigment seems to have been applied with a squeegee-like
instrument to achieve wide swirls of smeared and dragged color, like finger painting, played out
across empty white fields of gessoed canvas. Stylistically, the results are somewhere between the
gestural aerobics of Abstract Expressionism (especially the Sam Francis wing), the fluid automatism
of Chinese calligraphic painting and piled-up, Tiepoloesque cumuli (the large size of these canvases
further underlines the Baroque connection). Rather in the manner of clouds, in fact, the paintings
lend themselves readily to representational readings—The Smoke of Venus is literally a pillar of gray
smoke, or a fertility goddess, or a snowman, or none of the above; the red and yellow enamel paint
in Liz translates into a golden sun peering through apocalyptic clouds—or a close-up of microscopic
biological life.
Both interpretive elasticity and a kind of smiling stylistic appropriation (the resemblance, for
example, to Paul Jenkin’s color-field platitudes and to Gerhard Richter’s mock versions of the same)
produced some of the work’s humor, and raised some doubts about the seriousness with which it
took itself. After all the immense organically modeled forms these paintings offer are as insubstantial
as they are monumental, and the vast fields of churned-up, conflicting gestural action are as
purposeless as they are intense—an expressionist grammar without an expressionist content. Yet
Clough’s work seems always to have had far less to do with cutting painting down to size (Tom
Lawson, among others of Clough’s contemporaries, has that job) than with enjoying the crowded,
powerful history of its practice, and this recent work is his clearest means yet to that end. As with a
painter like van Dyck, the movement of the brush here really does seem to mean practically
everything, and as often an homage to painters he loved, the present work is an homage to paint
itself—and one which understands the fragile absurdity of its position.