Art News recommended by Yong Chen : Thomas Nozkowski's abstract paintings

A flatland of forms: Thomas Nozkowski's abstract paintings have long been characterized by their small scale and use of eccentric shapes against variegated grounds. His work was recently the subject of a trio of shows in the U.S. and Britain
Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Cary Levine

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The result is a flatland of forms, geometric but irregular. Likewise, the color effect of the background seems at once random--the result of chemical interactions between the green and blue pigments and of gravitational forces upon them--and expertly controlled by the artist. The expressionist's aggressive, impulsive drip is transformed into a stunningly graceful, patinalike glaze. Amazingly, this glistening flow of green and blue appears at points to physically respond to the red shapes, to actually wind like a stream around them--a phenomenon that is both captivating and confounding.

The show also evidenced Nozkowski's refusal to rely on a single signature style. The marbleizing in Untitled (8-27), for example, is a recent addition to Nozkowski's repertoire, also seen in Untilled (8-39), 2003, but to different ends. The surface of the latter work appears much drier and thicker. A yellow, orblike shape sits off-center, while lines curl through it, forming a gridlike, partially color-filled pattern. Here, it is the lines that present the paradox, since they seem at once spontaneous and to have been somehow chiseled into the impastoed facade of the work. Apparently carved into the surface and then repainted with a fluid purple-black, they read as both above and below, as foreground and background.

This effect is another Nozkowski stratagem--the forced contradiction between illusionistic space and physical space, between image and material. Untilled (7-106), 1998, employs Hofmannesque push-pull techniques to construct similar spatial riddles. Bright green boxes hover above the earthy sienna surface, which has been built up layer by layer. Meanwhile, a central form reads as a jagged porthole through which part of a black-and-white striped plane can be seen. At close range, however, an opposing interpretation snaps into view. The texture of the work provides this central shape with a dense, protruding physicality. The brown areas appear similarly substantial, beveling as they near the borders of the other forms. However, the green boxes--whose color "pushes" them into the illusionistic foreground--are in fact the flattest and thinnest, literally recessed back onto the canvas surface. The result is a relief effect completely at odds with the straight pictorial dynamics of the work.

At times, this relief quality defines forms within an otherwise monochromatic field. Most often, though, it is employed to intentionally disrupt singular readings and to keep the images in flux. Untitled (7-122), 1999, is dominated by a bright yellow form with loopy protrusions on one side, serrated edges on the other and red, elliptical oblongs punctuating its middle. Bordering it on the right are black shapes whose inky pigment runs downward--a somewhat menacing effect that contrasts with the Pop-ish character of the neighboring forms. All of this is surrounded by a lavender ground, built up and then (it appears) sanded down to reveal fibrous brushstroke striations and swirls beneath the surface. The painting thus oscillates between the "final" image and earlier phases.

The preservation of such ghostly remnants is to some extent planned in advance. Nozkowski works specifically on canvas-board or linen mounted on panel in anticipation of his continual scrapings and scorings. The process is time-consuming, and Nozkowski is a patient artist--punctilious, but never programmatic. His paintings frequently remain unfinished for extended periods, left to ferment, for the right moment to be reapproached, tweaked or very often completely reworked. Process is thus emphasized, but not in the improvisational, action-painting sense. Rather, it's the sustained, deliberate practice of patient craft.

Untitled (7-103), 1997, takes this to an extreme. Here, a red Suprematist square sits atop one of Nozkowski's most tortured surfaces. Scoured down to reveal innumerable layers of underpainting and at some points the raw linen itself, the work is a rugged terrain of peaks and craters, the walls of which reveal strata of paintings long past. This work had to have taken years to make. Viewers, in turn, become archeologists, searching the painting's pockmarked crust--its nooks and crannies, and flakes of dried pigment still hanging on by threads--for clues to its history.

Nozkowski's works are challenging to describe. Noting the tendency of critics to talk around his paintings, the artist has requested an alternative tactic:

I would like future writers to create new compound words and acronyms. They should also use long and complex words in short and simple sentences. Misspelling some word--either by doubling and tripling letters or by omitting them--could be especially meaningful as well. (5)

Indeed, a more oblique and poetic rumination may be the best approach to Nozkowski's paintings. The formal and conceptual intricacy of these works is, in the end, a testament to painting's persistent viability--its continued capacity to intrigue, to provoke and to mystify.

(1.) Barry Schwabsky, "The Source of the Nile (The Politics of Thomas Nozkowski)," online exhib. cat., New York Studio School, 2003, http://www.nyss.org/NOZKOWSKI/essay.html.

(2.) Nozkowski, "In Conversation: Thomas Nozkowski," interview with Chris Martin, Brooklyn Rail, December 2003-January 2004, p. 17.

(3.) Peter Schjeldahl, "Hard Bliss: The indispensable Thomas Nozkowski," in Thomas Nozkowski: Twenty Four Paintings, exhib. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1997, p. 14.

(4.) Ibid., p. 17.

(5.) Nozkowski, interview with Sherman Sam, KultureFlash, no. 67, 2003, http://www.kultureflash.net/archive/67/priview.html.

"Thomas Nozkowski: Twenty Paintings, 1992-2003" was on view at the Pollock Gallery at Southern Methodist University, Dallas [Jan. 19-Feb 21], and Haunch of Venison, London [Mar. 30-May 8]. A catalogue with a brief introduction by Barry Schwabsky accompanied the London show. An exhibition of Nozkowski's paintings appeared at Max Protetch Gallery, New York [Nov. 8-Dec. 20, 2003].

Cary Levine is a New York based critic.

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