Charles Gaines Interrogates the Nature of Meaning

These are the latest works in Gaines’s ongoing “Numbers and Trees” series, which embraces one of the enduring tropes of his five-decade career. Like a mash-up of pointillism and paint-by-numbers, these pixelated formations look like a Tetris game up close. But as one walks away, contemplating them from a distance, they begin to resemble the leafy Arizona cottonwoods depicted in the photos that are mounted beneath the grids.

There’s a Rorschach effect to these pieces, which are made according to rules-based systems. Gaines begins with an image—in this case, a photograph of a tree—and plots its outline to a dense grid. He arbitrarily assigns colors to the tree, and then his assistants paint and number the grids according to his systems. Gaines usually works in series of eight to 18, layering each finished grid with a new tree and additional colors, so the images become denser and richer. The final work, which consolidates all the grids into one unified piece, often creates what Gaines calls “a sublime response” in viewers. “My interest in doing this is to show the role that structures play in how things acquire meaning,” says Gaines. “I am making a point that art is not based upon your subjectivity.”