SHERMAN SAM: You were at the Whitney program in 1982/83.

CAROL SZYMANSKI: Yes, and before that I was at the San Francisco Art Institute, and received an MFA in video and performance art.

What did you do at the Whitney?

I was making 3-channel video installations, where I would video people having natural conversations. They would talk about their lives, say at a cocktail party. Then I would go back and transcribe what they said, and then bring them back into the same situation with the transcription and ask them to act out what they had said previously. So that was when I think back on that, I think of it as a bit of a Reality TV show.

It sounds ahead of its time, like something people might do today.

Yeah, I think a lot about that. I kind of stopped making video because at the time we had to carry big porta-paks around and it was very cumbersome. You really needed two or three people and no matter how much you set up a situation to prevent things going wrong technically, something would always go wrong. It was quite a frustrating experience.

At that time I was also very much involved in semiotics, I guess many people were in the early ‘80s, and that drew me to thinking about language. The beginning of making sculpture was developing this font based on the phonetic alphabet. I began to make abstract drawings with the font. I thought of doing the phonetic alphabet, which brought me to the phoneme being the simplest expression or thought that has meaning. I thought, “that’s something I wanna break and I can break it in an abstract way and I’ll have something that’s more than what the phoneme is.” So I took these single letters and started drawing abstract shapes with them with that in mind. That brought me into sculpture in the sense that I really wanted to do something more with the shape. I guess on some level I was thinking in a three-dimensional way although I have no sense of perspective in the sense of a traditional sculpture training [laughs].

Its ok, we’re all artists! None of us have any sense of perspective.

So that sort of evolved over the course of many years—working with fabricators and so on. One thing that I find interesting, reflecting back on that period and stays with my work today, is that I think because I don’t approach making sculpture in a traditional sense. For example I never have a base or a way in which the object sits. In fact a lot of my work have variable qualities… like they can be arranged in different directions. [Points at an image of her horn sculptures] So when I started making the horns from the shapes, they were just made to be held or played, then you can just set them down in whatever way you want.

Don’t you think that this notion of “baselessness” corresponds with that idea that it’s all language or sound or expression. And therefore these things can change and be reorganised. So maybe a base would anchor it too much?

I always think of them as sound and verbal expression connected to sound.

So do you think of them as – all across the work– making sound physical or visual?

Yes, definitely… I think it’s an interesting way to phrase it. I do think about making them physical, but they are more sort of conceptual experiments. I’m more interested in examining an idea or making than the physical object/image. It’s the result of a thought process that’s more like a philosophical position. I don’t want to say a remnant.. but, like something left over.

Maybe a proposition?

I have a degree in philosophy, so I think a lot of my work comes out of that study.

When we’re talking about this period where you shift from video to sculpture after the Whitney program are we talking a 10-year period? A 5-year period?

Well, I always considered video as sculpture, as opposed to film. I think 4-5 years. But I think I’m always not completely satisfied with what I’ve done, and that’s what moves me into the next work. I think I was frustrated with the nature of the medium and the expense involved. But now I would like move back into it.

It seems to me like with this show, although you have many, many different types of objects or expressions, they all feed into this basic proposition of working with sound.

Yes, that’s right.

And what strikes me having known you for so many years now is that its not like you think “oh, I can do this, then do that”, its seems more of an organic process..

At the time I was working with language in an abstract sense, which ended with making this phonetic alphabet and making these horns and the idea was shaped breath and that sound of the horn was a function of the shape of the letter. And that moved it into this language music thing. But I felt that I was running away from meaning in the sense of direct verbal expression. My work is about language but I wasn’t dealing with the words. When I went to London to work at the bank, I was not getting to the studio much. The cockshut dummys, [an email project] which was a practice where I could make art while I worked at the bank. I started writing and did this email project. So the cockshut dummys gave me an opportunity to address that distance from language, and that was satisfying. I loved that! And when I came back to New York I really wanted to write and find a way to incorporate writing and make sculpture at the same time. I wanted to use both and have both represented in my work without it being conceptual art, in the sense of text on a wall. Although I have started playing around with that, too.

What started this newest body of work is the thought that it’s hard for people to read texts on the wall. I picked two letter words, and made two letter word poems and then took the shapes from these two letters. So they would be both readable on the wall and abstract. Then I started looking at two letter words, and that’s when I hit the Solfege or the Solfegio, that’s do re me fa so la ti. Those are two letter words and I never saw them as two-letter words! Then I realised, “well they also represent sounds on a musical scale.. Oh my god!” This became a project I had to do to round out the other side of the horns. It was like a gift. So I returned to working with the font and came up with – what I call – the icons of the Solfege. It was invented by Guido Solfeggio in the Middle Ages. I realized that there were many individuals through out history that worked with it and created adjacent meanings, or in Wittgenstein’s terminology, “family resemblances”. So I was really interested in creating meaning with that kind of adjacency, instead of that variation of a theme which is what we see very much of today and is very much a given way you look at art. [ 1832]

So as I began to create a system, and that’s very much how I work, I create a system and work within it. The first thought was that I wanted the icons to become ballons, inflatable sculptures. I wanted it to be the inverse of the horns. They were shaped breath when blown: your lips round and become a shape. In the horns, air went through a tube but in this case I wanted the air to be contained. And that’s why I thought of inflatable sculpture. I really like the idea of not having a rigid base. I wanted the objects to float around people and move, and be variable.

The funny thing about the balloons is that they remind me of the horns.

That’s right, they were the same shapes as the horns. The first horn I made was “D” “O”. Then I made sculpture out of that shape, out of Lucite, where I had a computer carve that shape.

Today you can just 3-D print that. [laughs] I bet back then it was really difficult to do.

That’s why I stopped doing them.

So you were a pioneer of digital printing before it was digital printing!

It was engineered and took a long time back then: they had to be carved out of a solid block of Lucite. So it makes sense that you saw the same shape.

Coming back to your system, tell me a bit these different notations.

The hands are from John Curwen who wanted to created gestures for sight reading. He also assigned meaning – what I call sense – to the hand gestures, but he only did it for the major scales, so in my situation I added the five minor notes. I saw all of these things as creating music or songs, and I saw them as songs of Solfege. What’s important here is that Isaac Newton created this notation system for the colour and it is very much associated with sound. The things I got very discouraged about with myself was that I was just appropriating every body else’s notation systems… so I said this is silly I have to have my own. That I got very excited about.. so I decided to look at the Curwen meaning for the senses and start there, and got very excited about the interjection because that’s the closest thing between sounds and words that have meaning and their emotions. They’re in the zone between meaning and sound, and I just took interjections and assigned them to the twelve notes, or in the Schoenberg case eleven notes.. Then it came so easily, it was perfect! Music is emotional. It really fits to have an interjection as a musical note to me, that I assigned the 12 interjections and that’s what makes it.

The index feels like a summation, the whole show makes sense with it.

I hate to say this, but this is a lot like the kind of stuff we did at the bank! The charts and the graphs seem to be in my system.

In a sense they’re your I-Ching?

I used to throw the I-Ching all the time! Fundamentally I believe that categories create how we look at the world. And in whatever particular country or society, whatever micro/macro situation you’re in, how things are categorized is the way people understand them. So that’s how I became intrigued by the thesaurus. There really hasn’t been one since Roget that we take seriously. I like reading the thesaurus. I think it’s something I’ve been doing since my 20s. Now the question you haven’t asked me is about nonsense.

Nonsense?

Most of my understanding of reality or operations of behavior and people is that one never really sees what one gets. So there’s always an underlying message going on that you’re never really picking up on. That’s what I took away from the bank! That was going on where I worked. For instance: if a decision had to be made. They brought everyone in, but it had already been made. They just wanted everybody to believe that they were involved in making the decision. So there’s always that element, and nothing really makes sense. In fact what you’re understanding and what’s in front of you does not always make sense. That’s why the Berlusconi quote [a quote attributed as Qaddafi’s last words to Berlusconi is screen printed to the wall] so perfectly reflects that. That’s why I set up this logical or seemingly logical system where in fact it’s nonsensical. I want that nonsense in the system.

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Several years ago I received an email from Feature advertising the fact that they were going to be at an art fair where you could buy work, live, virtually. I couldn’t resist emailing Hudson to ask if he was really just sitting about the gallery when it was closed and selling to collectors from an online booth. His sanguine reply was that he would be physically present for sales but carrying his virtual paddle… such he said, was “post modern life’s complexities”. The virtual paddle, he said, “is everywhere computers or confusers, as I heard a friend call them, be.” Like his eye for drawing, he had a fine line in email

I was introduced to Hudson several years ago by our mutual friend, Melissa Meyer, who thought that we might like to chat about Ireland, as he was putting together a show there of tantric art. I gave him a catalogue and an invitation to a group show in New York that included my work, and he said he’d see it. Much to my surprise he did. Several years later, Hudson invited me to participate in a group drawing show with those same tantric works. That’s the serendipity of life in the arts I guess, but also it is a commonly told story regarding Hudson.  It surprised me how very committed he was to looking at art and following his own particular vision of it. And I was touched by the honesty of his opinion. I know he had long standing conversations with numerous artists, many of whom were not at exhibited Feature, with which he would offer his thoughts freely.

In the short time we communicated it became obvious to me – as someone based on the other side of the Atlantic – that Hudson’s vision was not determined by fashion or conducted for its youth, cool or even money. What defined Feature, Inc was a sensibility or approach to art making.  Leaving aside the most notable alumnus (Tom Friedman) this often entailed abstract art of a certain visual intensity and a strong haptic sense, such as that of Mamie Holst.  On the other hand there is also a noticeable strain in Hudson’s taste for skilfully witty assemblage as in Nancy Shaver or B. Wurtz. From Judy Linn’s quirky, painting-like photographs to the finely drawn erotic humor of Tom of Finland, Hudson’s eye was a keen one. Truly he was an artist’s gallerist, eccentric almost by definition. He sure will be missed.

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March 4 to April 19, 2014
320 West 13th Street at Horatio Street
New York City, 212 924 4212

Sherman Sam: So you were actually a successful figurative painter to start with. When did you change your work?

Clive Hodgson: Well, I made those paintings until 1989 or something. It’s a very long time ago. I did them because when I left art school I wasn’t sure that I’d done certain things I was curious about, so I made those figurative paintings because I was curious to find out if it was possible to make those kind of genre paintings that operated on a small scale. To me they were a formal experiment…

But you were successful though. Doesn’t the Arts Council own some of that work?

I think if I could get it back I would destroy it. It became a burden because you can’t get involved with that work without becoming involved with some kind of narrative about what the people were doing.

So you were painting pictures of people doing things?

Exactly.

What was the genre you were painting?

They were a bit like characters out of Dickens. Greedy people, people fighting, people being disgusting, self-indulgent.. They were more like Dutch tavern scenes. But what I was really doing was playing with arrangements of things.

Like you do now.

Yeah. Circles of people, people in a line, people bending over. What I think is interesting now is that the background often contained stripey things, or patterns, or elements that since appear in their own right.

So when did you stop painting figuratively?

I did a whole load of these “tavern-like” people and I thought that it was too grim, so I did a series of paintings of bathers that were ridiculously idyllic, and even a bit gay for some reason. The gallery I was going to show them in went bust, so they got mothballed and then I felt as though that was definitely the end of the line.  I couldn’t sustain that. I was curious about other things. So, in fact, I reverted to making abstract paintings.
Also, I did those figurative paintings at a time when Mrs Thatcher was in power. I felt that the social situation was bad. I went to see a big show of Schnabel at Whitechapel and saw Gilbert and George’s work at the Tate, and I remember thinking that there isn’t any point in competing with anything like Schnabel, that I wouldn’t go there. I formulated for myself this idea of small-scale painting, which had very different values. At the heart of that figuration there were some good ideas that did something, but – I think – there was the danger of being seduced by completely stupid ideas about what people are doing, who they are, where they are etc. that was way off target.

So you made abstract paintings before you made figurative paintings! Presumably then you made abstract paintings when you were in art school.

Early on, yeah.

Wow. And what were they like?

Pretty much like the ones I do now [laughs] Some of them were loose hanging pieces with a lot of painted surfaces. They didn’t have content in a way, they were just objects that were painted or had very simple division and that’s something that’s recurred for sure. But the first abstract paintings that I resumed with were of spots and stripes, in a pattern-like mode.

Was there a reason for this or was it where the instinct took you?

The bathers were some attempt to make something much lighter in spirit and form. But the spot things was a way to make something with very little reference to mass.  Something very light, and something dispersed.

Was there an allusion to any formal concept or something, in the way, for example, Bridget Riley alludes to nature?

No. That would be repellent. Things that look like something would bother me.

Yes, I feel the same way about my work. I think if I wanted it to look like nature, I would have done nature. But your earlier [abstract] paintings were not straightforward geometric abstraction then?

They had a lot to do simply with patterns, lattices, stripes, spots, and often they were done serially. There were groups of five or seven, say. I made for example a large object, which formed a ring, in which the colors could go in any order.

How did you come from there to what you paint now? It was quite a long time right?

I’m afraid it’s been a long time, yeah. To go from there to where I am now is probably to do with exploring different manifestations of this idea of lightness and dispersal. So after the geometry and the spots and the repetitions, or series of paintings with spots with different colorings, like variations on a theme, I started to do things that were deliberately ornamental. And to do with symmetry.  I was using some borrowed motifs from Renaissance art, or earlier. Again they had a kind of structure that was basically coming apart as much as they were coming together.

So was it the idea of choosing something minor from a visual language and making it the focus?

Yes, but its also that I’d been interested in decorative things.

“Decorative things” as in when someone collects door handles or as in a type of representation?

The decorative thing I saw as being painting, existing in a real and vivid form precisely because it is outside of traditional painting – that is formal painting, easel painting, paintings confined by a stretcher and canvas. So there would be decorative painting on walls, like marbling or patterns, and on furniture…. All of that attracted me, and it had to do with the painting spreading outside of a confine. And that represented something that appealed to me – something rambling and not centred.

Sounds like 1970s French philosophy.

A rambling thought..less-ness

Full of puns.

But it was also about using a motif that wasn’t too freighted with meaning. Even circles and stripes seem to resonate with certain bits of symbolism. One can’t really escape that, but some of the decorative, ornamental work I saw and made seemed to point towards an area of playfulness and to something that refused meaning.

Why is it important to you to make painting that refuses meaning?

It’s a very difficult thing to explain.

Well, did you have a program where you wanted to do these “meaningless things” or was there a moment when these representational things didn’t work?  And you just thought, I’ll go with painting that, then it led somewhere and then you were eventually painting these things?

It was more deliberate than that. I got sick of the “meanings” in the figurative paintings for sure, where narratives seem to get in the way of an encounter with the painting itself. I think that of course it is possible that they go together, there is a whole art history where they could go together.

Let’s come back to the point when you made this decision.

At some point painting becomes more articulate in its own right because it becomes isolated from carrying messages, so the ornament thing is familiar but it carries no message. Things easily seem to get too symbolic or have very strong geometric connotations, for example in a Euclidian way or a Platonic way, and then it begins to seem like symbolism again. I was looking for where the painting seemed real to me in the way that decorative painting seemed real. Something begins to happen because there aren’t any points of reference for meanings.

It’s like the eerie experience  of seeing cave paintings in places like Lascaux, where an animal is scraped into the curve of the wall but unlike a lot of representational painting where you always see the representation, rather than the object of the representation.

I’ve tried often enough to making a painting where there is a representation and also it operates as a painting that satisfies me.

Like those still-lifes you were painting last year.

Exactly. Whether or not it succeeds is open to question, but the question again is quite deliberate. I was curious to know if I could put something back in there and allow the painting to be something that I felt was operating at another level.

But that’s like having two genres instead of one….say, for example, a group of people having a picnic in a landscape. So there are portraits, landscapes and still-lifes.. as in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

I was curious as to whether I could put back various elements into an image, but that is like going back to the question that came up with the figures in the first place. I’m not convinced that it’s a sensible thing to do at all.

Making paintings or making abstractions?

The still-lifes.

Could they be landscapes then?

I don’t see why not, or portraits.

But what strikes me is that your most interestingly bad paintings are the ones that are not still still-lifes as such but they representations of still-lifes. They look sketchy…[laughs]

God, why are we talking about the still-lifes?

Because you were thinking that you were going to devote a year to them, so they must be worth something to you.

What you’ve just said has something of the truth in it – that they are paintings about paintings of still-lifes. So they’re not just about the still-lifes. There is a double layer to it.

But I think that’s what your paintings are, they are paintings of paintings.

The abstract paintings do this too. I think they refer to abstractions in a similar way.

But not ironically. They still want to be paintings, rather than philosophical discussions about the nature of painting.

They do want to be paintings. I’m in favour of making some thing confrontational, which may sound absurd considering what I do, but something that has got some difficulty in it, both for me and for other people. The still-lifes are difficult, presumably, for people who think I’m an idiot for doing them.

Isn’that just the nature of making serious paintings today? We live in a time when things are getting easier and easier to consume.

Recently, after several years of making paintings with my name in, which some people found very annoying, these  paintings gradually got quite empty of anything except the name, and seemed a bit, in a way, nihilistic.

Why is that, do you think?

Well, the danger is that it seems a bit maudlin… in the way that there can be a sentimentality about poor old Clive painting these sad paintings. Following those relatively “empty” ones, I questioned again the idea of putting something else in, and there was a question in my mind about whether that was a concession,  to allow people to have something to relate to, to be less solipsistic.

Yeah, exactly, Ryman was there first, 1955 or whenever.

But that doesn’t make the work nihilistic.

No, for me it was the coupling of a kind of emptiness with the rest of the painting.

Well Ryman’s paintings are a bit more aestheticized than yours. Or perhaps we’ve had more years to digest them.  Maybe you have no taste? Well, not no taste but… there is a deliberately shoddy surface.

Deliberately shoddy?

Raoul de Keyser has that look.

That’s very difficult to place… umm I don’t know about that. I make them quite carefully, it seems to me.

In your generation, you were quite well trained presumably?

Yes. But I guess I want them to include a moment of impulse. So there is a feeling of some moment of attack.  Or perhaps of a jump.

In the time I’ve known you, the quality I find most consistent in your work and in you personally is the quality of doubt. You  question what you do a lot, but we also find that quality in your work. How they are made, their scale, makes us question the status of your painting.

I find that I can only work with an idea for a certain period. I can work on a certain number of paintings till something rises up within me that says, if this has got such and such quality, what would happen if it did not have that quality? So there is a reaction and counter reaction always. It’s quite difficult in terms of continuity, if people want continuity, because it makes me react against my own work. And often I want to destroy it and indeed do destroy it. So in that sense I am skeptical of what it achieves and I’m skeptical of the ideas I work with, and I’m not certain they have any value. But maybe I don’t even want to be certain that it has value?

Do you think the work you make has value in our current visual culture? Do you think your work is contemporary?

Well, I worry about it seeming like the work of somebody who’s obsessed with steam engines or someone who likes to fix up old things. Painting is probably a less significant art form now, and I am specifically interested in painting. But I also think that one makes work partly because of the context – to some extent you are for it or against it. So the scale of work, the nature of work, my interest in its hand-craftedness, the nature of it being slightly unpredictable, I think that is to some extent, in some small way, a reaction against certain currents of the contemporary art world. Even to a certain extent politically so. But having said that I would like to keep finding always some way of dealing with actual, lived experience .  We’re each of us in our own little time zone, and it’s different from the Fifities, different the Eighties, from the 2000s even.

I think if you were the same person as an adult in the Fifties you probably wouldn’t be able to make what you make now.

Yes, that’s right, I would be reacting against or for things of that period. But it’s very difficult to map out what is for or against. I think time will reveal what is contemporary. Or not so much what’s contemporary as what has insight into a particular moment in time.

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In keeping with Dave Hickey’s idea of art writing being commensurate with playing air guitar – “flurries of silent sympathetic gestures with nothing in their heart but the memory of the music” – then the appropriate motions for Alex Katz’s paintings would be a poetic finger-snapping ring-a-zing zing or lyric hip-wiggling. The words that could accompany Katz’s paintings include “lyrical,” “cool,” “chilled” and “rhythmic”: all modes that are equally used to describe music, and perhaps even being by the sea – the theme to one of his two shows on these shores. Recent paintings at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London followed by a compact collection in Margate’s Turner Contemporary provide a clearer view of the artist’s elegance.

At Turner Contemporary a corridor of small paintings is sandwiched by two big galleries with generally larger and more recent works. Flowers, landscapes, night themes and portraits in the corridor, spanning a forty-year period, offer a gemlike walk though various ideas in the artist’s career. This small grouping, in fact, becomes a retrospective within the exhibition demonstrating the breath of his themes but also the consistency of his vision through the years. A small early collage Sea Land Sky (1959) provides a glimpse of Katz’s reductive thinking early on. Essentially just three bands of color: a gray rectangle, a cool blue middle band, flat at the top edge and undulating at the lower edge, with a blue green bottom third implying the land. It evokes the simple, contemplative seascape that one imagines. Sea Land Sky is a good example of how Katz is able to use the bare minimum, color, line and edge in this case, to evoke place and mood.

During a talk at the gallery, Katz described the ethos of his work as having grown out of a response to the existential nature of Abstract Expressionism. In that regard, his light touch offers a strong counter solace to the action painter’s angst. Pleasure and ease, his painting seems to suggest is just as important a quality of life as the raw meditation on existence; and what better balm for raw existence than languishing by the beach. Give Me Tomorrow, a collaboration between Tate St. Ives and Margate Contemporary, two venues in English seaside towns, brings together predominantly large images of ocean themed paintings. In the large galleries at Margate, Katz’s subjects play, swim, sail, sit on the beach; they are entirely languid in their presentness, probably being caressed by a warm sea breeze. The most compelling piece actually offers very little in terms of image, or, for that matter, human beings. Beige Ocean (1999) is a painting of surf or waves. Composed of whites, creams, faint yellows, and a few diagonal brushes of paint to evoke the bubble and spray of surf and ocean motion. Here it is the faint gestures and close color tones that bring about the sense of fluid motion but also the emotional calm of the sea. This creamy painting is like a Chinese scroll offering nature for contemplation, and from that point of view, the Katz offers its viewer a foothold to being present.

Representing a place or time is not uncommon in figurative painting. But that impulse, when combined with the nature of Katz’s schematic approach (flat color, cool gesture), seems a world away from the plein air nature of, say, Impressionist painting. It is well known that his work is created through a methodical system, which involves a preparatory sketch, then a drawing, and a cartoon that helps to plan the painting. The actual painted act comes about rapidly with some improvisation, perhaps comparable to jazz where structure and improvisation work together. A twist of the hand, a moment in time, determine the tone of Katz’s efforts. His painted world though should be considered more than just luxe, calme et volupté, that hallmark of Matisse. It seems to me that the success and impact of a Katz painting depends on just this moment of presentness, what the artists himself calls painting in the “present tense.” Hence, being present, but one that is at ease, would seem to be his counter point to mere existential existence. His is a cool modernity.

Coda. The latest paintings, on view at Timothy Taylor’s in London, of flowers and portraits offers a new point of view for the octogenarian: a double portrait of the same person in a single frame. Take note that this is no Warholian repetition, rather the same model is depicted at close up and from distance, as well as from different angles. For example, a portrait of Ada, is a close-up of her glancing over her shoulder on the left, while there is a three quarter length view of her back on the right, or Chris, (2012), presents his subject nude on the left and her head painted on the right. Although apparently simple as an idea, given his conception of painting in the present tense, it subtly implies that two moments of time are presented in a singe frame. At least for this moment.

Give Me Tomorrow was at Tate St Ives, May 19 to September 23, 2012 and Turner Contemporary, Margate, October 6, 2012 to January 13, 2013.  Katz’s exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, was September 5 to October 5, 2012.

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until December 20

Unpacking a Thomas Nozkowski painting is akin to reading Beckett, sinking into Raging Bull, or catching a Dylan song. An experience that always leaves you challenged but full of visual riches.

First, the facts. Nozkowski’s working method is simple; a moment encountered, a moment remembered, re-made, re-painted again and again, continually, until that moment of visual equilibrium arrives. For the past 3 decades, he has been making these objects in a similar way, format (mainly 16 x 20 inches, though lately they have grown in size to 22 x 28 and even 30 x 40) and material (oil on canvasboard, now on linen stretched over panel). For all that, the result is seldom the same: a floating chequered blob, a colour bar (albeit with the wrong colours) with spindly legs, a domed sky – marked out with little squares – parted by a crevice, a repeated scrawl crawling across a pinky-purple picture plane, black blobs fencing in a part of the pictured, a soft target, denatured grids, coloured lozenges streaking through an orange sky. Very roughly, the
resultant imagery is an elision of biomorphic and geometric imagery, mutated by a visual-cultural language. His forms were once described as the “vexed silhouette” pinned smack in the middle of the picture, but of late they have moved away from the sole central form into a landscape of
architectural blob-fields. Hence, the final result is more the vexed or pleasantly perplexed viewer.

These descriptions merely scratch at the surface, it does not bring us any closer to an understanding of them. First and foremost, these are paintings; and in a decade past, full of black boxes, ironic painting and installation – all predominately conceptually-based – these paintings
stand for something different. They are not Abstract Expressionist (that is neither large field nor mythic paintings), or iconic non-representational objects, or even ironic in attitude, which makes them unusual – even here in this city. Nozkowski instead, seems to be a one-man painting band, constantly reinventing the world. Are they mere hermetic objects? In a world of their own? Yes and no. They leave you with your own thoughts, hence a hermeticism of sorts; but that is because our theoretical language for abstraction lags behind him. With the wealth of references and a world of silence, words sometimes lack the suppleness required for this visuality.

A contemporary of Richard Tuttle’s, another supple thinker of big things in small ways, Nozkowski also requires a supple mind to feel through his art. “Flat figurations” and “anti-form” are terms thrown at Tuttle, which may also be appropriate nouns to sit close to Nozkowski. The figural or
hectic biomorphism of his paintings, both touch at the body or bodily functions, but also hint at Nature in general. Memory in the guise of form is deformed, then re-formed. Here, perhaps Deleuze and Guattari’s analogy for rhizomatic thinking may be of help: “The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its colour, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its ‘aparallel evolutions’ through to the end.” That statement probably sounded better and made more sense in French, but then there’s something estranging in Nozkowski’s thought as well. As experience is translated into grids, blobs, denatured or even “natured” geometry, colour – which incidentally Nozkowski says he “abuses” -, for us the viewer, the confrontation is always a brand new “line of flight”.

Some paintings make statements, whilest others distinctly ask questions. Both though when successful in the field of abstractions, tend to affect the parameters of painting itself. It seems that a Nozkowski – at one level – is contantly biting at the boundaries of abstractions, and
certainly Painting’s history. Rather than taking Painting to its physical limits as a Fabian Maccacio or Jessica Stockholder might do, Nozkowski is closer in spirit to Jonathan Lasker and Raoul de Keyser in his interrogation of Painting’s limits from within. Irrespective of his sources or even intentions, each encounter is a new beginning, a new experience and not just an unsubtle philosophical argument.

Nozkowski once said that Song Dynasty painters regarded en scene painting as vulgar; instead the moment was to be brought back to the studio and translated. Perhaps Nozkowski’s paintings are Song Dynasty on the Hudson. He has painted the world in his “color”, which is not just “pink on pink”.

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