Charles Gaines
For over five decades, Charles Gaines has created Conceptual artwork with a distinct rule-based system that emphasizes procedure over intuitive self-expression. Beginning with photographs of his respective subjects, he converts their forms into numbers on a grid, assigning discrete hues to each numeral. Layered atop one another, these color-coded schemas constitute what he calls gridworks—a stratified aesthetic format whose pixelated shapes hark back to early computer graphics. The product of calculation as opposed to sentiment, these works embody Gaines’s aim to remove subjectivity from artmaking, highlighting the determinism of social systems and the arbitrary nature of meaning.
The figure of the tree is central to Gaines’s practice—most notably in his seminal “Numbers and Trees” series, a decades-long endeavor that features kaleidoscopic assemblages of the titular structure. A new set of meticulous gridworks, in “Numbers and Trees, The Tanzania Baobabs,” on view at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, sees the artist extend his canonical series beyond the Western Hemisphere for the first time. Centered on the Tanzanian baobab, Africa’s largest tree—known as “the tree of life”—the show presents nine large-scale triptychs based on photographs Gaines took on an extensive trip across the country. The new works are striking, exploding with prismatic complexity. But Gaines reminds viewers that these colors just happen to be pretty. Indeed, the baobab series extends Gaines’s legendary take on sequential pointillism and Conceptual art, evincing a delightful aesthetic based purely on chance.
I STARTED WORKING with trees in the mid-1970s, when I began Walnut Tree Orchard, 1975–2014. At the time, I was frequently driving in Fresno, where I was teaching studio art at the University of California. I thought it was interesting that if you look at a walnut orchard, no two trees are exactly alike. I became interested in the idea that while these walnut trees were each unique, they possessed some shared quality that made them all identifiable as a single species. There was a simultaneous difference and similarity. My desire to visually represent that duality was the catalyst for the first tree works.
The works also emerged from a sense of discontent on my part. I was not happy with conventional notions of what constituted art—both the art object and the process of creating it. When I was in graduate school in the 1960s, the modernist ideology of expressionism dominated. It was essentially the belief that art is produced from your imagination. Within this worldview, a painter’s mark on a canvas was a gesture of pure expression from some intuitive source, unmitigated by the intellect. My problem with modernism is that it’s a totalizing theory. I’m not against self-expression; I’m just against this absolutist viewpoint.
This latest body of work is an exciting development on that anti-absolutism, as it approaches the tree gridworks from a completely new vantage point. Until this point, all the landscapes I’ve worked with have been North American. For this project, I wanted to work with a tree species from an unfamiliar terrain. My research found that there are two trees that people in the Western Hemisphere generally don’t recognize—the Tanzania baobab and the acacia. In September 2023, I went to Tanzania for two weeks to shoot both species. Initially, I wasn’t sure what I was going to use. But we had the West Hollywood exhibition as a target, and I knew that it would be a continuation of my gridworks. The show evolved into an opportunity to do an entire series with large-scale, eight-by-twelve triptychs, which I hadn’t done since 2016.
It takes twenty-one hours to get to Arusha, Tanzania, from Los Angeles. It was a big trip, and I’d never gone to such lengths to create work. My son and his partner, as well as my wife, were with me—they came for the animals. I had a photographer, a director of production, and a manager of outside projects, so there was a motley crew dedicated to the expedition.
We arranged to have two guides take us around to see trees. We first went to Ngorongoro, an amazing park where we found the majority of the baobab trees that we shot. From there, we traveled to the Ngorongoro Crater, which is the largest in the world, with a diameter of twelve miles, created by a prehistoric eruption. Next, we went to the Serengeti and shot most of our acacia trees. The Serengeti is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It gives me chills just thinking about it. Going through, there were elephant paths, and you encounter all kinds of animals. So, during this very rigorous shoot—hundreds of photographs, ten-hour days—we had a couple of hair-raising encounters. The guides were incredible—all trained botanists and biologists, who understand the landscape. They like to drive fast over rough terrain, just like Indiana Jones movies. It was a thrill.
When we got back from Tanzania, I laid all the photographs out and began isolating those images. In this series, I’m alternating between two plotting strategies—one of which I have never used before. The first aggregates the shapes of different trees sequentially over a photograph of a single tree, with its color-coded variant placed atop the combination of previous layers. In the second, newer process, an enlarged detail of the tree crown—which I call an “exploded” image—is placed on the back panel, with the photo of that entire tree placed on the front Plexiglas panel. With this novel method, the gridded tree layers are revealed only within the shape of the exploded image, not comprehensively, as in the first plotting system—creating a completely new effect in which the photographed tree assumes prominence. When I see what this new strategy has produced, it’s simply amazing and unlike any of my other trees.
Even after all these years, the work remains provocative; there’s always discussion and debate about my intentionality. People are unsatisfied that their meaningful experience of the work is not the product of artistic purpose but the product of chance—a consequence of circumstances that just happen to come together. I simply take different elements and put them together without knowing how they will interact. So I am dumbfounded when the assemblages have a strong emotional effect, not just on audiences, but occasionally on me. Those unexpected emotions speak to the evocative potential of systems. I, along with everybody else, watch—and sometimes marvel at—the meaning the art produces.
