Charles Csuri revisits a portrait he painted in 1958, transforming its recognizable face and richly worked surface into a digital composition of repeated, curling forms, bridging different eras in his artistic career.
Provenance
Published by Nicolae Galerie, Columbus, Ohio, in December 1989 for a commission from Coopers & Lybrand, according to the accompanying gallery edition statement. Accompanied by the Nicolae Galerie edition statement and certificate identifying impression 2/19; the original frame backing bears the gallery label.
Long Ago and Far Away makes visible the continuity between Csuri’s painting and his computer art. Seen alongside Four BSpline Men (1965) and Random War (1967), it extends his sustained interest in transforming figures through computation. Here that investigation includes the color and surface detail of his own earlier painting. The title invites a reading of the image as a return to an earlier artistic life. The Cibachrome medium gives the computer-generated composition a period-specific physical form.
The 1989 date places Long Ago and Far Away in a transitional chapter of Csuri’s career. Much of his energy in the early 1980s went into computer-graphics research and Cranston/Csuri Productions, the commercial animation company he co-founded in 1981. He left the company in 1985 and continued his research and teaching at Ohio State before retiring in July 1990 to devote himself full-time to art. This artwork offers an uncommon glimpse of his personal artistic practice on the threshold of his return to the studio.