March 20, 2009 at the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, New York

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Michael Brenson, Carol Diehl, and David Ebony joined David Cohen to review Kamrooz Aram at Perry Rubinstein, Siah Armajani at Max Protetch, Alfredo Jaar at Galerie Lelong, and Susan Rothenberg at Sperone Westwater.

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Requiem Reversals, Zach Harris’s first solo show at Max Protetch Gallery, is a curious yet oddly potent collection of works. Evading strict role definitions of painting and relief, Harris has crafted hybrids of the two that combine bold, otherworldly imagery with ornate sculptural supports. These dense aggregates of geometric patterning, Utopian landscape and delicate filigree invite extended contemplation, and at their best function as powerful modern-day secular icons.

Like the Buddhist devotional paintings Harris often quotes, his works link pictorial production to specific meditative states. The landscapes he depicts are purely internal in origin, and together operate as forms of visual notation from a disembodied vantage point. Despite the dramatic spatial recession of works like Option Eye, for example, in which colorful blocks crowd row behind infinite row, the structural components of Harris’ scenes seem to inhabit a symbolic, rather than a spatial, realm. Conventional readings of “above” and “below”, of north, south, east and west are confounded in these panels by the integration of patterned motifs – diamond shapes and curlicues – that resist any such perspectival pre-conditions. The improbable worlds that Harris presents are less pictures of places than visual destinations within elaborate structures, guiding the eye ever-centerwards.

Harris establishes a very fluid relationship between the three-dimensional patterning of the framework and the seductive scenes within. The conversation that results taps the evocative nature of pattern itself: beyond the beautiful and decorative, simple geometric motifs can also be highly charged, and even emotive. In Sunrises 88, for example, layers of plywood have been built up around the periphery of the surface of the work, then cut away in lateral curves to yield a formation of luminous petal-shapes. The effect creates a sculptural counterpart to the newly radiant light evoked by the title, and to the glowing shapes centrally depicted. Conversely, the jagged external forms of Venus Flytrap physically convey the latent danger of a sharp edge before the moment of an ill-fated touch.

There is, however, a danger in this system of tactile and imagistic mix-and-match.  A couple of works, like History Painting Dream, for example, suffer from an incoherent gathering of sources, amounting to a collision of images within ill-defined parameters. Clearly, the playful maze-work and distinctive motifs that elsewhere create a strong formal presence can be cartoonish and contrived when mishandled. But it was my experience, surprisingly, that these less-powerful works strengthen the overall show: in Harris’ unusual recipe it helps to see what doesn’t work to appreciate what does. The potentially uncomfortable melding of disparate elements that his approach entails is a tricky business, and, as with an alchemist at work, there is no guarantee that a valuable substrate will result from the mix. This play of unseen stakes is, perhaps, part of what makes Harris’ concretized variations of internalized form so compelling.

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Dore Ashton, Joshua Mack and Stephen Maine joined David Cohen to review Julian Hatton at Elizabeth Harris, Byron Kim at Max Protetch, Alexander Ross at Marianne Boesky and at David Nolan and Tabaimo at James Cohan.

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February 14 to March 15, 2008

Long established in America, Bingyi Huang nevertheless looks to traditional Chinese culture for her materials and inspiration. The artist holds a doctorate in art history from Yale, but her true vocation  is painting, albeit of a very contemporary kind; she combines a delicate, naïve style with references to Chinese literature and history. The title of her show, “Six Accounts of a Floating Life,” refers to the civil servant Shen Fu’s tales of love and Chinese mores. Originally composed of six chapters, only four of Shen’s book have survived–hence her four-panel oil on canvas (2008) that takes his title as the name of the painting. Three more black-and-white works are found in this small but compelling show, which also includes two crystal-resin sculptures that again deal with problems of private memory and its possible permanence through art.

Entitled Red Flag, the first panel of Six Accounts, an epic, ten-meter-long painting, shows a three-quarter view of Mao sitting on a rock, looking out at the red flag of China. The flag is positioned in the upper-right corner, a long distance from the Mao figure, who is placed in the lower right. According to the artist, the character for Mao can also mean hair, and so Huang paints hair sprouting from his back like an unholy version of angel’s wings. While no editorial statement, either for or against Mao’s government, is made, the flag’s remove from China’s communist founder suggests that such idealism is hard to achieve. Ostensibly a portrait of a failed state,

Red Flag can be linked to the scholar portraits of an earlier time, in which a figure in contemplation is nearly lost in a mountainous landscape. Here Huang herself is meditating on the troubled, enigmatic legacy of a China whose contemporary fervor for capitalism has quickly made the writings and beliefs of Chairman Mao anachronistic, if not irrelevant.

Huang’s treatment of the Chinese tradition is more enigmatic in You Me and Her,in which a woman with prominently diseased lungs—a portrait of the artist herself, perhaps—occupies the lower-right corner of the painting. Above her, toward the middle of the work, is an ominous image of a soldier wearing sunglasses and a helmet with a red star, while off to the left a person is sleeping. It is hard to say what the relations between the images are, but one feels that they are of an intimate and private nature—this in contrast to the civic transparency of Chairman Mao’s likeness. In the last of the four panels, Departure, Huang may well be referring to her own emigration from China; we see two transparent pieces of luggage, one with a gun in it. Below is a large, black organic form—a cloud of pollution—that again refers to some of the exigencies of Chinese life. Given Huang’s indirectness, we experience the scene as if imbued with symbolist forms, which reveal their meaning only fleetingly. Yet the painting does not feel deliberately obscure, but rather poses the question, How much must be revealed before the images makes narrative sense?

The crystal-resin sculpture entitled The Man that I Loved (2008) is more straightforwardly an ode to memory—Huang has made the recollection of a lover permanent by encasing personal effects in clear amber, a celebration that exists, paradoxically, at least in part because the relationship is over. We find in the sculpture a pair of broken eyeglasses, a slowly leaking pen, and a black sweater—objects associated with an intimacy that, while finished, has been turned into something lasting. This is a kind of concrete poetry, something that Huang specializes in. In the painting Dust, the artist refers to a famous historical image: that of a single, unarmed man standing up to a tank during the Tienanmen Square incident. For Huang, that kind of independence, public and private to the same degree, is reiterated in marvelous ways that both engage and provoke her audience.

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Ben Davis, Lance Esplund, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Tara Donovan at the Met, Anne Harris at Alexandre, Bharti Kher at Jack Shainman, David Reed at Max Protetch, and Zhang Huan at the Asia Society.

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Michael Brenson, Martha Schwendener, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Rachel Whiteread at Luhring Augustine, Su-en Wong at Danese, Jake Berthot at Betty Cuningham and Thomas Nozkowski at Max Protetch.

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TONY BERLANT: Within
Lennon, Weinberg until March 11 (514 W. 24 Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-941-0012)

Thomas Nozkowski’s paintings call out for oxymoronic exaltations: bravura reticence! Fluent awkwardness! Grandiose humility!

Mr. Nozkowski’s inventions burst with a peculiar hybrid energy that takes its charge from doubt. He makes “anxious objects” that, rather than allow viewers to lose themselves in the pieces’ inherent sensuality, revel in self-questioning, whether about scale, intention, resolution, or purpose. His highly personal iconography — derived from observed things and phenomena but coy about their sources — brings to mind a phrase Frank Auerbach used in relation to the late works of Walter Sickert: “Grand, living, and quirky forms.”

But Mr. Nozkowski’s latest exhibition at Max Protetch suggests this 61 year-old painterly existentialist is finally learning to relax. There is still plenty of fiddly awkwardness in the brushstrokes, and in their scale relation to the whole. But within Mr. Nozkowski’s consistently reigned-in format (the typical work, in linen stretched on panel, is around 22 inches by 28 inches), he is going for seductively legible compositions, bright colors in cheery relationships, crisp edges, and sumptuous bleeds. Showing his tender side, this notoriously “jolie-laide” painter is suddenly easy on the eye.

“Untitled (8–69)” (2005) — as of yet Mr. Nozkowski is no flirt in his titles — reads like an unfilled baroque ceiling. Protruding forms cling to the edges like arches, pinching into the central space, which is an allover dribbly wash. The eye is lured simultaneously into flat, precise delineations of the edge and the deep space of the center.

“Untitled (8-75)” (2005) has hard-edged vertical stripes in scorching violet, yellow, red, and orange against more typically dusty purple, pink, and blue. Here are reminders of the color-field abstraction against which the young Mr. Nozkowski rebelled with his belligerently small and pictorially involved compositions. But true to his subversive self, the stripes lean at odd angles, revealing shadow-like forms of jagged irregularity.

It is a hallmark of a Nozkowski show to avoid hallmarks. Instead of settling for the variations-on-a-theme format typical of solo exhibitions, the artist seems to have set himself the Herculean task of giving each painting a self-contained vocabulary. What lends the show consistency, preventing any hint of irony or diffidence, is a common sensibility. Like the old Nehru slogan, he goes for unity in diversity.

In the past, Mr. Nozkowski has tended to favor a figure-ground dynamic. If not quite figures, his shapes have exuded a sense of being personages standing out against a relatively neutral supporting space. This used to give his work a whiff of the vintage avant-garde, recalling mid-century Surrealists or abstract masters.

There is still a sense, in the new works’ scale and facture, that these are pictures rather than paintings, in that they engage the imagination instead of enveloping the gaze. But these days Mr. Nozkowski seems intent on frustrating a neat figure-ground relationship, even in those paintings where this is most preserved.

In “Untitled (8–76)” (2005), balls in varying sizes trap sack-like shapes in light shades of mustard, chatreuse, and moss; this net-like constellation stands out against a molten ground of fiery red fizzling out into a golden horizon. In “Untitled (8-67)” (2005), the biomorph that floats, off-center, against the acqueous plaid ground is composed of a cluster of discrete, testicular forms. These individual elements break down a sense of the figure as a single form: They are emphatically painted in crisp colors and even, thick paint towards the shape’s center, but loosen towards transparency at its edges.

Some new works, however, share a fascination with the grid that goes back to the origins both of abstraction and of the artist’s career. “Untitled (8–77)” (2005) epitomizes the magical dualism of Mr. Nozkowski’s compositional approach. Approximately 18 inches high by 22 wide, it is a grid of little black squares against white. Dots at the top and left side of the composition give way to larger squares, rectangles and, in the lower right corner, a sequence of colored squares. It is a simple idea subverted to yield complexity; a field that coalesces into a cogent form; a digital, reductive system that transforms into a hieroglyph, which is turns pulsates with a personal touch redolent of handwriting.

Tony Berlant’s collages are bizarre and exhilarating. Just when you start to tire of their fastidious craft or grow suspicious of their seemingly gratuitous overload, they come back at you with their range of expression and depth of intrigue. The craft turns back into art again.

Mr. Berlant works in cutout shards of printed tin that he puts together with mind-boggling ease. His materials are fastened to their plywood support with steel brads that stud the surfaces.  This constitutesa kind of pointillism that adds further texture and alloverness to what was already a dense, complex picture plane. He is attracted to forms in nature that parallel his art practice: scales, plumage, bark, blades.

“Anytime” (2005) is a dense, symbolist landscape at the heart of which gorgeous, sickly fluctuations of purple and ochre intimate a desert terrain. In some spots, the actual representations in the appropriated tin are used to pictorial effect — grass for instance, in the lower part of the composition — while at others they just become texture and color, like the glaring orange strips shaped into individual blades of grass at the top. This results in bewildering oscillations in scale.

Here are shades of Max Ernst’s collage novels cut from Victorian illustrated books and scientific manuals, but Mr. Berlant’s pieces lack the Surrealist’s penchant for juxtapositional metaphor. Similarly, thoughts of Fred Tomasselli’s acid trip overloads quickly recede: Less sensational and iconic, Mr. Bertant’s lyrical, complex forms sustain attention precisely because of their rich, complex nebulousness.

The studs have complex associations: They are at once like stars and the nails in an African fetish. Just like his collage materials — which make you aware of actual stuff on a flat surface, and open up strange vistas into mysterious inner spaces — they simultaneously ground and etherealize.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, February 23, 2006

Nozkowski

Berlant

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“Garth Evans, Watercolors” at Lori Bookstein until January 7 (37 W. 57th Street, 212-750-0949).

“Lisa Hoke: The Gravity of Color” at Elizabeth Harris until December 23 (529 W. 20th Street between 10th & 11th Avenues, 212-463-9666).

“Alfred Leslie 1951-1962: Expressing the Zeitgeist” at Allan Stone until December 22 (113 E 90 th Street between Park and Lexington Avneues, 212 987 4997).

David Reed and Garth Evans are improvisors at the top of their form. Where Mr. Evans is like a laid back pianist tinkering away at a set of variations in a warm, quiet bar, Mr. Reed is the last of the big bandsmen, high in style, decibels, and spirits. Mr. Reed is showing new paintings at Max Protetch, Mr. Evans a set of watercolors in the project room at Lori Bookstein—in their different ways they both have us rethinking one of the most cherished dichotomies of the painting phenomenon: transparency versus opaqueness. Each is fascinated by the spatial depths and related emotional resonances of color and materiality. Each uses technique at a high pitch to play depth against surface, closure against ethereality. But the differences between them come down to more than mere mood or means.

Mr. Evans is the more old-fashioned of the two. You can tell right off that he is primarily a sculptor. It is not just because there is always a figure set against a ground (in his case geometric shapes rather than anything anthropomorphic). There’s also an awareness of the expressive value of roughness; although the page is saturated by watercolor used counter-intuitively with almost chalky, pigment-rich earthiness. There’s little instance of the watercolorist’s traditional love of the naked whiteness of the paper, and yet the support has presence: its physicality is played off against the illusion of receding space, achieved with billowing, brooding, pulsating color. The geometric forms have a complexity that subverts the space around them, tucking themselves back and forth within competing picture planes.

Mr. Evans is consumate in his skillful use of the medium and profound in his play with depth and surface, but there is something strong and honest about the use of material; we see through it to form. Mr. Reed, by contrast, is a wizard, a pyrotechnician with paint. He wows and disconcerts with his layering techniques. Where an Evans is spatial, a Reed is spacey. The former is rough on the edges, but you see what you are getting; the latter is silky smooth and slick, reveling in enigma. One is about form, the other style.

With Mr. Reed, the retina feels like its being seduced by a jelly-fish. His complexities of temperature and speed throw the eye about with a tricksiness of baroque proportions. His squiggles manage to recall at once medieval drapery and Bronx graffiti: Martin Schongauer meets Kenny Sharf. Actually, at his best he recalls Sargent in his painterly panache. Where Mr. Evans carves out strong, solid, albeit spatially ambiguous forms, Mr. Reed’s highly energetic, slippery, ethereal squiggles are much more about sensation as an end in itself, about perception than that the perceived. Observers have often remarked how his paint looks photographic. Like a photograph, we see right through the paint to the image it evokes, and yet his image IS the paint—philosophically he is as slippery as his squiggles, which is just the way we like it.

Lisa Hoke has seemed in the past an amusing decorator whose trademark motif would soon exhaust itself. Her installation at Elizabeth Harris puts paid to that: it is good, true and beautiful. She follows on neatly from Mr. Evans and Mr. Reed, not just because of a shared affection for serpentine forms and rich chroma. She has found a strategy to saturate the gaze without teasing the mind. Building effective, rich patterns from banal yet gorgeous means.

She recalls Antonì Gaudi in this regards: as his walls are encrusted with shards of gaudy, glistening ceramic, hers postmodernize the found object while preserving its jouissance with a vocabulary consisting, primarily, of two elements: found paper coffee or soda cups and plastic beakers quarter filled with paint. These are massed to form blocks of color, the cups protruding sculpturally, the beakers swirling into swathes of pure surface. These elements bring to mind the pioneers of painterly digitalism, Seurat and Klimt. She isn’t just about technique and its semiotic implications, however: there is genuine exploration of color sensations—not just chroma but hue. It is a major work that demands return visits to penetrate its depths, and to revel in its surfaces.

***

Alfred Leslie’s abstraction is the stuff of legend, for it is often told how he turned his back on an accomplished early style to embrace the new perceptual realism of the 1960s, the style for which he is better known. It turns out, as the cache Allan Stone has gathered together at his Upper Eastside Gallery, that he was a highly accomplished if somewhat derivative Abstract Expressionst in the 1950s. The experience of this show is rather like finding a vintage cadillac in a long locked garage: they are as fresh as the day they were painted and roaring to go.

There are undoubtedly strong influences from better known painters like de Kooning and Kline in the way emphatic brushstrokes define structure, chance effects are given full play, and the paint embodies the sensation of flesh, and there is probably some influence from such figures as Al Held and Milton Resnick. But the palette has a panache of its own that belies the existential heaviness of his peers, and the energy is prodigious.

I spoke with him as his show opened about the distance he must feel from his early artistic self. On the contrary, he sees absolute continuity between his charged, loose, gutsy bravura painting and collage of the 1950s and the hermetically tight realism, with its bid to create a contemporary history painting, of the subsequent decades, such as his Caravaggesque series devoted to the death of Frank O’Hara, or the monumental series of full-frontal male and female nudes. He stresses frontality, confrontation and all-overness as the underlying formal continuum.

There is a clue about his impatience with abstraction in the experimental movies he directed, two of which are being screened by Mr. Stone in a special projection room (including “Pull my Daisy” with a script by Jack Kerouac, who narrates). Ms. Leslie’s allegiance was to the avantgarde in its broad manifestation, not towards a specific style or technique.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, December 16, 2004

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“Thomas Nozkowski: New Paintings” at Max Protetch until December 20 (511 W.22nd Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212 633 6999).

For most of its history, non-representational painting favored the universal over the particular. The very word “abstraction” implies idealism, generalization, the metaphysical. Laying bare material and semiotic components alike, abstraction vigorously challenged conventions of scale and format associated with easel painting.

Howard Hodgkin and Thomas Nozkowski are artists of very different appeal who have in common a rare but timely characteristic: their abstraction is animated with the personal and the particular. These artists manage to tap the energies of perceptual painting without engaging in depiction per se, and to connect their practice with lived experience without resorting to explicit narrative.

While Sir Howard enjoys international renown with his sumptuous, expressive, painterly lyricism, Mr. Nozkowski, who is a decade younger than the Englishman, for once justifies the over-used epithet, “painter’s painter.” His tight, awkward, oddball style excites a fanatical following in the New York art world, but there hasn’t been a corresponding commercial or institutional take-up as yet. Temperament and reputation aside, however, the alignment of solo exhibitions by these two painters in Chelsea (Sir Howard at Gagosian, Mr. Nozkowski at Max Protetch) is all the more remarkable because each painter is revealed at the height of his game.

Sir Howard Hodgkin tempts an oxymoron: Intimism with bravura. The painting in his show entitled “After Vuillard” signals an allegiance with the works of the French symbolist renowned for his fusion of interiority and decoration. But a Hodgkin tends to feel like Vuillard repainted by Franz Kline, the Abstract Expressionist, with the latter’s butch, boisterous, and emphatic brushstrokes. Another analogy would be of an impatient giant trying to paint Persian miniatures.

These characterizations suggest an element of buffoonery, yet his work is marked by subtlety and emotional range. He is an incredible colorist, not just because of his penchant for high octane hues and daring juxtapositions, but equally because of the balancing act he achieves between big strokes and delicate modulations.

Sir Howard literally and metaphorically works upon the conventional easel picture, choosing as his support ready-framed wooden boards. His brushstrokes violate distinctions between frame and pictorial window -self-consciously, of course – so that by doing so the boundaries are actually accentuated. This personalized convention is bolstered by a further Hodgkinesque painting device: a brushy, open rectangular form that pictorially frames interior painterly incident.

In the hands of a lesser artist, all this would soon become formulaic, but Sir Howard seems, instead, to have invented a painting form with the expressive potential of the sonnet: the Hodgkin frame-within-the-frame actually operates as a starting point, the very opposite of a frame with its connotations of closure.

He goes way beyond the modern convention of decorated frames stretching through Seurat and Klimt to the Pre-Raphaelites. He is insisting on the dual nature of painting as thing and depiction, defined at the outset of the modern movement by Vuillard’s colleague Maurice Denis with his famous assertion that a painting is “essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”

The Gagosian Gallery rather feels like an old master collection where each image has been painted over by a vandal, albeit one with exquisite taste. There is often a sense of another picture lurking beneath the surface, that the bold strokes on top obscure more delicate ones beneath. There is also the feeling that these thick, fast, somewhat oafish marks are personally encoded commentaries on paintings of the past, with weird compressions of nuance and precision, or perhaps the opposite, the blow-up of these values.

Diminutive scale used to be a hallmark of this artist, corresponding to a contemplative mood, and there are several small works in this show that suggest no let-up in this direction. “Mud,” 2002, a sparse image of 15 x 18 inches, consists of a murky green rectangle cropping a smattering of black and the exposed, battered, grainy wood of the support: It is an essay in preciousness and poise.

Recently, however, Sir Howard has cranked upped his size, modifying his touch in proportion. An agitated scribbliness that relates to early work by his peer David Hockney is new in his handling, and there’s also a more voluptuous, wet looseness that recalls de Kooning’s example as well as the latter’s remark that “flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” The speed, daring, and fluency of Sir Howard’s recent paintings suggest an artist self-consciously entering his “old age” style. This bolsters the connection with old masters painting. It also links the expansion in his painterly range with a sense of mortality, of existential urgency.

***

Thomas Nozkowski could be described as an abstract un-expressionist: his works ooze reticence. His intense quirky compositions with their tight drawing and contained painterly effects are in marked contrast with the passionate, gushing romanticism of Howard Hodgkin.

At the outset of his career in the 1970s Mr. Nozkowski headed off the dominant trend towards reductive, open field painting with a determination to work small, at an easel, drawing a distinctive form vocabulary from things personally observed. In interviews he has identified some of his sources: a history of the Crusades, old architectural journals picked up in a library sale, fabrics, cartoons.

Motifs are heavily filtered through the artist’s very particular sensibility, arriving at the canvas or page abstracted in the sense that any legible specifics from their earlier incarnation are heavily disguised.. It is not even that they are puzzles asking to be decoded.

Compositionally, he is something of a traditionalist in that he insists on figure-ground relationships. This gives his paintings the energy of still-lives or portraits but without the anecdotal incident that comes with actual depiction. And while his paintings bring to mind artists like Miró and Klee, they are free of overt psychological content. Nozkowski “figures” are types but not archetypes

The artist has a peculiar dead-pan touch, again to be defined in negatives. He is not a minimalist: on the contrary, there is enormous variety in the quality of marks he puts down; but nor is he an expressionist who invests textures or strokes with “personality.” His colors are odd and interesting but never terribly pleasant. The ultimate irony of his diffident yet involved touch and his insignificant but insistent signs is that he is not an ironist, either. So what is Thomas Nozkowski?

The answer, I think, is that he is a truly radical abstract artist. There is an incredible sensation in a Nozkowski exhibition that although each painting is unmistakably his from a mile away, no two paintings are really alike. The enigma is always self-contained: The eye is detained and engaged within the picture. Taking to heart Kant’s definition of beauty as “purposiveness without purpose,” Mr. Nozkowski has found a great means by which to keep himself-and us-busy.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 20, 2003

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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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