Chuck Close at PaceWildenstein - New York - collection of paintings and daguerreotype photographs

In this show of recent work, Chuck Close exhibited paintings and daguerreotypes together for the first time. By now, his efforts in both mediums are familiar, but the juxtaposition yielded the most revealing view yet of his lifelong project to render the decentered self in portraiture. Although Close came to the daguerreotype only in the 1990s, with the help of his collaborator, Jerry Spagnoli, it already seems impossible to appreciate the radical nature of his art without it.

The viewer's experiences of the two bodies of work seemed diametrically opposed to one another: eight enormous oil-on-canvas paintings, with their mannerist excess of grid and blob, in the main room, and 37 daguerreotypes on metal plates, each just 6 1/2 by 8 1/2 inches, systematically arranged at just below eye level in the smaller room. The paintings pushed and pulled; the daguerreotypes solicited. The paintings allowed no purchase, no vantage point from which any of them would resolve into stable forms: no more recognizable faces--as there were years ago--in close's world of increasingly pure process painting.

Among the daguerreotypes, however, were familiar faces aplenty. Kiki Smith, Philip Glass, Andres Serrano, Kirk Varnedoe and other art-world notables, all invited visitors to step up and peer. And the more you looked, the more you saw--Smith's extraordinary eyes, Glass's rumpledness. Because of the short focal length of the lens in the daguerreotype camera, faces seem to emerge from an almost aqueous background, less like photos than apparitions. Close's self-portrait underlines this paradox, his owlish glasses reiterating that artist and audience are creatures who long to see clearly.

But see what, exactly? The daguerreotypes provide the formal definition which the paintings deliberately undermine. And yet, their superabundance of detail can turn the familiar into the utterly strange. It is impossible to linger anywhere in the image without being drawn to other, incidental but inescapable visual facts--like freckles, wrinkles or facial hair--and impossible to carry away a unified sense of the subject.

In the end, the rooms offered two versions of the experience of indeterminate perception, alternate means for overcoming the conventional structuring of visual information and, with it, conventions about the understanding of the self. But there was an underlying poignancy, and on this, the daguerreotype had the last reflective word. A diptych showed two views of the artist's hand, flaccid, almost simian in its flatness, yet responsible for that roomful of heroic paintings. It seemed to say: photography frames mysteries; painting enacts them.

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