Charles Bell Biography
Charles Bell (1935 - 1995) is one of the champions of photorealism, he created his paintings through photographs of different subjects such as still lifes immersed in pop culture. He worked from photographs taken by himself to reproduce even the smallest detail with a hyper-realistic precision technique and created his works on a scale even ten times the natural size of the subject in question, using bright, vibrant colors and also capable of transmitting sensations that could be challenged in a duel with photography. His main subjects are chewing gum vending machines, marbles, pinball machines, old tin toys and even action figures in classic poses, which give his works a pictorial majesty rarely matched by few artists. In 1995 he participated in the "American Masters" exhibition, curated by Michael McKenzie for the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, together with two of his most admired artists: Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol. For this he created a screenprint called The Viking, considered a masterpiece which required 51 plates, 11 proofs and 10 months to complete. That glassy and brilliant texture of his paintings, mostly made in oil, transports us second into the atmosphere in which these artistic motifs reign, making us participants not only in the reproduction itself, but also in being able to listen to the mechanisms of the toys, the coins of vending machines and the sounds of pinball machines. An experience that is more emotional than purely intellectual or cultural which conveys an everyday life that is not without charm and a ticket to travel back in time to the past, to the moment in which Bell captured that piece of reality and immortalized it on canvas.
