In art, as in life, categorization runs rampant. Everything gets sorted, classified and labeled. This subjective process is deemed a prerequisite for understanding an artist's work and for assigning it a position in the grand scheme of art history and in the grandiose anarchy of the marketplace. Since the late 1960s, Chuck Close's tag has read "super realist." That designation doesn't begin to do justice to his remarkable career.

Looking at the 16 images in "Chuck Close--Self-Portraits," at David Adamson Gallery, you can see, staring back at you, where the super-realist label came from and why it's no longer valid. In his early portraits and self-portraits, Close projected photographs onto big canvases and painted them. That magnified the faces, turning pores into pits, whiskers into wires and nostrils into bottomless black grottoes. If the Brobdingnagian details became overwhelming, you stepped back and they coalesced into a big face, super real.

But that was, as this small but rich survey demonstrates, just the starting point of a journey unparalleled in contemporary art, an ongoing odyssey best described by the term mountaineers use for the world's riskiest climbs: beyond category.

For Close is up there and out there, and he always has been. He was digital way before it became a household word. Look at his etching and aquatint self-portraits from 1977 and 1978. That pixilated person is composed of handmade pixels. Think of Close's airbrushed dot drawings, built on a grid of tiny squares, elements approximating the 0's and 1's of binary code.

As for reality, Close understood that it was a malleable concept long before television began beaming surreal game shows into our homes. Take the two huge digital inkjet self-portraits from 1999, the only digitally produced images in the exhibition, both coming from David Adamson's Iris printer.

These images of Close at age 59 don't look digital. No pixels are visible. One image is in color, the other in black and white. In color, the blue in Close's shirt is echoed in his eyes, making him seem warm, friendly and slightly bemused. In the black-and-white picture, his shirt is dark, its collar buttoned, and his right eyebrow is raised. With his bald pate, he looks comically demonic, like a cross between Col. Klink from "Hogan's Heroes" and Satan.

That's what is so captivating about Close's pictures. They connect the artless honesty, the facial nudity of photo booths, yearbooks and mug shots, with the art of yesterday, today and tomorrow. No other artist is so adept at blurring the lines we employ to divide history, technology and culture into digestible chunks.

In this handful of pictures, you can find elements that resemble the work of Seurat, Ingres, Rembrandt, Monet, van Gogh and de Kooning. Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, inventor of the first feasible photographic process, is there, too.

But Close's daguerreotype self-portrait made earlier this year isn't just a homage or reference or rip-off. It's typical Close magic, an old technique used on a familiar subject to make an image that looks uncannily like a hologram.

Close's technical wizardry seems endless. Aquatint, etching, silk-screen, paper pulp, linoleum block--those are just what we see here. Add oils, watercolors, airbrush, finger paint and just about every other medium known to man to the list.

But great skills alone don't make great portraits. Gerrit Dou had phenomenal skills. So did his teacher, Rembrandt, whose portraits, particularly his self-portraits, still have vibrant psychological presence. Dou's, on the other hand, are lifeless beauties.

Close uses technology and history as tools for exploring art, life and himself. Like Rembrandt, Close continually confronts art's shifting context and processes, while unflinchingly examining his face and existence. To paraphrase William Butler Yeats's poem "When You Are Old," it's about loving the pilgrim soul in you and loving "the sorrows of your changing face."

That sounds easy, yet it's hard to do; witness the upsurge in plastic surgery. Most of us never look too deeply into the mirror because we're afraid of what we'll see: age pulling us inexorably to earth; time gobbling our opportunities; complicities and compromises etched into the visage of someone we don't really know or like.

Judging by his face as depicted in his art, Chuck Close appears to be a man at peace with himself. He hasn't faced the welter of difficulties that Rembrandt did. But Close's career has had ups and downs. In 1988, he nearly died and was left partially paralyzed. Looking at his face before and after the medical meltdown he describes as "an event," there are some differences. The vertical lines between his eyes are deeper and longer, like the bellows of an accordion pumped mightily by pain and the strain of concentration. And Close's jaw looks tighter somehow, as if it had been clenched a lot.

But there's no sign of disability in the art, just the seamless, soaring development of one of the greatest artists of our time. That makes you realize that the most important creative centers are the brain and the heart, the supercomputer and soul of a category-defying man.