Uncanny Likeness: Charles Clough’s Recent Paintings
Charles A. Riley II
Grand Salon, New York, New York, (by the author’s permission)
17 November-17 December 1994
(Charles A. Riley II is a professor of English at City University of New York and writes for many
magazines.)

Just before the opening of the current exhibition at the Grand Salon, when Charles Clough should
have been (as he usually is) painting like mad all day long in his busy midtown studio, he was up at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art one morning procrastinating his way through the blockbuster
shows of his beloved progenitor Willem de Kooning as well as the early Impressionist works of the
Salon of 1859 and the decade following. Standing in rapture before these heroic examples of the
painterly and the gestural, Clough, without any trace of anxiety, feels his link to the tradition of color
and paint. He says, “I’m an art lover and my litany of infatuations is one thick book.” Like
Mallarme’s mythic, universal “Livre” or the brushstroke that de Kooning imagined could “contain all
colors at once,” Clough’s dream is of a work that achieves an impossible inclusiveness, pulling
together the Baroque, the Romantic, Symbolism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and even the
aesthetic of the Far East. Together with the current exhibitions of the Impressionists, de Kooning and
Cy Twombly—and looking ahead to the coming Franz Kline retrospective—this exhibition of
Charles Clough’s recent paintings will delight those who want (we might even say need) to have
their diet of paint. The work of a true virtuoso both in terms of color and gesture, Clough’s
explosions in blues, reds, golds and every other tone should satisfy that appetite.
Charles Clough is probably the top colorist around these days. The mighty vistas and spinning
vortices of his compositions, which strain the horizontal and vertical bounds of the canvases to the
point that they always seem to be forcibly cropped, bring together landscape and portraiture. Their
perpetual motion and energy derive from Clough’s sense of the paint’s potential, so reminiscent not
only of Hans Hofmann, the master, but of Howard Hodgkin, Gerhard Richter and early Kline as
well. As Clough has stated, “To put the color; to pour; to touch the color; to blot; to blend the color;
to smear; color-shape is manifold, an all of everything. Occasionally the touchy, chancy, chaos
yields arabesques of chromatic chiaroscuro worth the will to keep and a congruency of making,
viewing and imagination is achieved in the pursuit of jouissance to a flash of satori. The magic
moment of the evanescent inspiration lies in the auspicious accident of the inflection of color.” This
kind of faith in chromaticism and its literal significance is rare in our era, well past the moment when
Josef Albers declared that “color deceives continually” and the Minimalists decided it could not be
trusted at all .
Clough steers the primary interaction of his colors to a metaphorical and psychological dimension as
well. The result is a depth experience of surprising and even disturbing darkness. As he explains, “In
my paintings you have a glimpse of content crashing against a glimpse of the absolute. They are a
way of addressing Nature and chaos at a moment that incorporates birth and death, conception and
destruction. I want drama, deep tension—trauma.” This is a mighty load for a Modernist work to
carry, but in Holy Family, to take one example, it is impossible to deny that Clough has tapped into
the tension of the family romance, original sin and redemption brought by the touch of that Kline-like
black character and surrounded by the artist’s signature swirl of orange, gold and red against a cloud
of blue. Although the work is not based on a particular Old Master version of the theme, it makes
you feel the connection to the deep-rooted greens and reds of Mathias Grünewald. “I affirm the
Aristotelian view of art as catharsis: that it provides a symbolic screen for psychological projection,”
he has written. In his Society of Faces, based in part on Iroquois ritual masks, Clough bathes that
screen in pinks and greys that suggest de Kooning, but lets loose around them his flame-like orange
and red passages.
None of this—the depth experience, the sense of motion, the raw power—is possible without
exceptional technical accomplishment. Clough’s sonorous maroon and blue bass harmonies and
ringing top notes of gold and orange have as their operatic counterpart the articulated chest tones
demanded by Verdi, known in his time as “the Attila of the voice.” Like a good Verdi baritone,
Clough has the necessary fluency and clarity in his grip. His technical innovations include the
invention of the “big finger,” huge disk-like pads on extended handles that he uses to twirl and blot
his revolving color forms. As he notes, “The tools are the rules, but I don’t think anybody breaks
paint the way I break paint. By locating my technique I found my promised land and each painting is
another vista on that promised land.” Step up close to Jaziz or Sine Qua Non and you will see the
mingling of blues and whites, the flowing lava-like hot tones over the dark blues, and heavy spots of
pure color that layer up these works. When he titled Sine Qua Non, Clough probably had in mind an
observation by Jean-Claude Lebenstejn on Alexander Cozen’s New Method (1785): “The blot is a
concordance of effect able to revive an emotion and exalt the imagination to the point of making it
create. The blot is the sine qua non of painting; the essence of pictorial idea”.
Clough learned by looking and painting analytically. He started with close observation of the
paintings of Clyfford Still and Morgan Russell that he had at his fingertips in the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery in his native Buffalo. The pulsing, full-bodied tones of Russell’s painting, along with an
obvious tip of the hat to Hodgkin and early Kline, are palpably behind the dark masses of Castalia.

It takes its title from the fountain and river sacred to the muses in ancient greek
literature. Against those slabs of color you have little touches, like that spray of orange just over your
left eyebrow that you can only see from up close. These works channel a flow of dark chromaticism,
which is more in the tradition of Kline than in that of de Kooning or Twombly who built their
paintings on cream.
That current continues in another work that takes its title from a river—Lethe—which has a firmer
geometry, and almost a hint of symmetry like the play of image and reflection, which in turn
suggests the great Talisman of Paul Serusier. With a strong need to try out a wide range and quantity
of images, Clough works on several scales at once, down to miniature paintings on board that are,
remarkably, fully composed and articulated just like the vast ones he has done on corporate
commissions and for The Brooklyn Museum. “The tools allow me to negotiate scales from the
fourteen by twenty-one foot works down to a tiny quarter inch by half-inch piece. Of course I dream
of acres of canvas stretched over a dry lake in Utah, because the finite is one of my greatest fears,”
he says.
While metaphysics is an inevitable part of any conversation with Charles Clough about painting, and
his faith in color is profound, he retains a strong Modernist impulse to test the premises of his
aesthetic. In addition to his paintings and drawings, he is a poet and ardent landscape photographer.
His composite images of waterfalls and woodland scenes, which bear an obvious relation to the
cataracts and dappled light of his paintings, crowd the tables in his studio. In fact, the use of
photography and the act of painting over photography have been essential to his development, and he
uses one to dialectically challenge the other. “Initially I was skeptical of painting’s conventions, its
seeming perversity, so each likeness to convention is a function of critical necessity and experiencing
belief.” That doubting sensibility may be an essential dynamic element of Clough’s studio practice,
but out in the light of the gallery these works give paintings its proof.
(This essay is based on a series of studio visits and interviews generously granted by the artist during
the past year).