University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

• Print

• Comments

• 

  NF, March 25, 1979; AFH, March 25, 1979. Enamel and collage elements on canvas, UB Art Galleries, gift of June and Ralph Obler

By SANDRA Q. FIRMIN

Published: March 22, 2012

“The Way to Clufffalo,” a 40-year retrospective of the work of Buffalo-born artist and Hallwalls co-founder Charles Clough, will be on exhibit from March 31 through May 19 in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts, North Campus.

A free public reception for the artist will take place from 6-8 p.m. March 31 in the gallery.

The exhibition was organized by Sandra Q. Firmin, curator for the UB Art Galleries.

“The Way to Clufffalo” chronicles Clough’s lifelong artistic pursuit, which he calls “Pepfog,” an acronym for the “photographic epic of a painter as a film or a ghost.”

The exhibition will feature more than 100 collages, paintings, artist books, sculptures and videos that illuminate more than 40 years of artistic production.

A major portion of the exhibition will include items from among more than 400 Clough works donated to the UB Art Galleries by renowned art collectors Herbert and Dorothy Vogel.

In 1974, Clough, along with Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, founded Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. Clough made the most of the raw, industrial space by gluing cutout photos of his eyes, enhanced with paint, to the brick walls, creating the eerie effect of people being watched.

His exuberance for Abstract Expressionism, however, always was foremost in his mind. In 1973, he recalls buying “a large variety of hardware and five-and-dime store type colored liquids: paints, sealers, cosmetics, etc., which I randomly applied to paper and wood, and then partially removed with a grinder.”

In 1978, Clough left Buffalo for New York City, where he embarked on his “C-Notes”—made by fingerpainting on top of art-book reproductions that he then enlarged as color photographs and repainted, loosening the compositions of artistic historical giants like Titian into playful swathes of color.

Elevating fingerpainting to new, esoteric heights, Clough was commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum in 1985 to create three paintings for the museum’s cavernous lobby. His solution to tackling the immense scale of the space was to invent the “Big Finger” tools: padded discs of varying sizes attached to long sticks that he used to spread high-gloss enamel onto large-scale canvases and sheets of masonite. The “Big Finger” paintings, with their cosmic vastness, vortices and stormy appearances, channel the sublime energy of awesome, spiraling universal forces that also captivated such Romantic painters as Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner in the 19th century.

Clough’s most recent undertaking returns to his interest in the aura of the painting and its reproduction to explore issues of time, authorship, authenticity and appropriation, as well as how art accrues value and circulates in the art world.

“O My Goodness,” 2010, is a painting on masonite that sequentially cycles through a Janson’s-style history of world religions through art, starting with a scratchy, black, cosmic void that morphs into a cave painting. From there, Clough incrementally grinds down the image and overlays it with his characteristic expressionistic abstractions before painting another iconic image.

Using digital photography, this process was recorded in 3,749 photographs, resulting in a flipbook-like movie that condenses the last 32,000 years of human cultural production into a short film. The final painting functions as a palimpsest and poignant meditation on the passage of time.

The UB Art Gallery also will hold several public programs in conjunction with “The Way to Clufffalo”:

• Flutist Mario Caroli will perform Salvatore Sciarinno’s Opera “Per Flauto” amidst the bright, swirling colors of three mural-sized, Clough paintings. 4 p.m., April 20, Lightwell Gallery, UB Art Gallery. Co-sponsored by the The Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music.
• Holly E. Hughes, curator for the collection, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, will discuss the legacy of modernism in Clough’s paintings. Noon to 1 p.m., April 26, UB Art Gallery.
• Clough conducts a performative archeological dig of a Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center relic—successive layers of large sheets of paper that Clough and cohorts scribbled on and variously “used” from the beginning of Hallwalls until Clough moved to New York in 1978. 7-8 p.m., May 17, UB Art Gallery. This event is organized in conjunction with the annual conference for the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG).
• Clough will create a mural-size painting using his “Big Finger” tools during a parking lot paint party. 1-3 p.m. May 19, UB Anderson Gallery, 1 Martha Jackson Place, off Englewood Avenue between Main Street and Kenmore Avenue.

For more information, call 645-6913.