The Brooklyn Rail

In paint, recognition always butts up against necessity, creating the temptation to name something where there is just some thing. I remember standing in front of a Thomas Nozkowski painting six years ago, staring into its central green mass, which was like moss floating in the canvas’s fleshy pink. The coagulated oil was running over the underlying shapes in strings, and those pink ovals felt like organs emerging, glistening, from this place that was clearly reacting against the air. I remembered blowing up balloons as a kid, the halting moment when the humid rubber had been filled to capacity, and how the knot was a navel left on pure form. The most enigmatic of Nozkowski’s compositions have that sense of holding in a swelling against their own limits; they are forms developing with the necessary burdens of the material, like cotyledons buckled with loam. Nozkowski touched on that tension in a 2010 interview with John Yau in these pages:

One of the strategies that I’ve always used in different permutations is to, as a first step, go to the opposite of what the logical move would be. So if a painting would seem to have a source that is anthropomorphic or organic, you know, start geometrically. If a painting has a source in a city and architecture in the urban, let’s do it with curves and juicy paint running all over the place. And this is not out of perversity, but out of a desire to challenge any kind of received wisdom. In other words, if a city has to be geometric, well, okay, let it prove itself, let it become geometric in the process, in the procedure of thinking about these things. This interests me—looking for the core of things.

This focus on “things” and their vagueness leaves me dreaming of a more specific English, because getting at the core of things with brushes and knives implies that there might be more thingly ways to paint, that some shapes can be thinglier than others. But Nozkowski’s method of buttressing organic with geometric and vice versa is more a muscular response to the thing-ness of his medium and its tools (the reality of corralling pooling liquid with cropped bundles of hair) than it is a conceptual procedure taking aim at some final image. And, regardless of the artist’s justifications, what we are faced with in a Nozkowski is a very real thing, a manifold entity that convinces us of its place in this world without giving up a name.

So it’s a joy to see these formative paintings assembled here, which in so many ways begin to carve out a vocabulary for decades of morphology to come. The story is familiar by now: after studying at the Cooper Union, Nozkowski, tired of Ab Ex, Pop, and Minimalism, and trying to reconcile the role of the artist in the political tumult of the sixties, turns to sculpture. He frequently assembles found objects on the floor: lengths of colored fabric, shards of glass or clay, aquarium gravel, and shows some of these “piles” with Betty Parsons. When he returns to painting in the early seventies, he sets himself some parameters: the paintings would be small and on prefabricated 16 by 20-inch canvas board, and their subjects would come from life. Beyond the stated goal of making paintings for his “friends’ tenement apartments,” these choices positioned Nozkowski against the heroic trend in painting, and closer to the contemplative mood found in the devotional panels that he had seen in a whirlwind tour of Italy.

Critics have listed three main inspirations in the work of the seventies and eighties, which reflect the increasing time Nozkowski and the sculptor Joyce Robins spent upstate in the Catskills, away from the city: a waterfall motif, a birch trunk against a sky with constellations, and the bright colors of hunting season against the foliage. In the grouping on view here, the waterfalls are earliest and most easily recognizable because they also function as a facile metaphor: paint as water, water as paint. The irony is that these waterfall paintings find Nozkowski, in many compositions, drawing instead of painting, describing the falls with attenuated lines in polychromy, so that the rush of water against ridges could be mistaken for multicolor tinsel or the inner workings of a circuit board. In one, an orange and a red flow in volumes against a flat green, and in another, graphic blue lines hook into themselves against a tan background, like a visionary Hokusai. Or consider a panel from 1980, in which red and maroon stream out from a vanishing point, curling over some abyss before halting, clean-cut, against the baby blue background—it is inherently funny, like a cartoon locomotive rushing forward, or even a toupee shorn from its bald spot. There are also paintings less readily related to waterfalls that nonetheless get at the nature of water: a thin curve of blue glimpsed through a verdant field blushed with pink, or a stepped green shape that is a bit too pathetic to represent a mountain ridge and is maybe closer to an out-of-commission hydrant. One 1977 panel is composed entirely of blue and yellow squiggles against a pink ground, dancing like toy snakes. The painting is unabashedly about an impressionistic trick, brushing wet vertical shapes with horizontal strokes to make them into watery reflections. There is the sense that Nozkowski is not interested in the illusion, but the effect itself, just as how the more articulated shapes of the falls in other panels convey an architecture devoid of context, a point of view floating in pure color.

I can only identify two works here that fit neatly into the birch/constellation series. Both, from 1979 and 1980 respectively, feature a diagonal trunk against a patterned sky. The latter is more advanced and further removed from naturalism, its constellations completely built from imagination rather than memory, so that its shooting appendage functions less as a believable foreground than as a formal distinction, a choice in the picture plane. Those paths of black and white, pushed to the border, hint at later work where pattern was allowed to accumulate and constitute shape itself. The point—if there is any—of identifying these motifs, could be to see how quickly Nozkowski digests form and texture, building up a vocabulary of difference. In the remaining, baffling paintings in this show, which constitute a solid middle ground between early and late style, subjects and motifs are not at all important. Could some recall a hunter’s neon vest in the forest? Sure—but only because that subject is analogous with what is so foundational to painting and abstraction: the sudden shock of recognition, the collision of the invented and the remembered.

Beyond presenting twenty-seven of these early 16 by 20-inch works, the show is unique for the chance to see a suite of painted sculptures—where Nozkowski took the rushing brushstrokes of the waterfall paintings and applied them to conical wooden structures—and for the inclusion of four rarely seen large-scale canvases. The large paintings, ranging from 1981 to 1986 and measuring roughly four by five feet, are supremely accomplished and worked-over biomorphic abstractions. They each feature ovoid shapes joined with overlapping lines and plasma; sometimes the intersecting curves and diagonals recall the intricacy of Spanish tiles, and sometimes the textured, spotted blooms are closer to animal hide, as in Arthur Dove’s tectonic Cow (1912). Their surfaces are properly built up, stratified with scratches, ossified brushstrokes, washes that have dried up like muddy shores. But, standing in front of them, the burden of the scale is obvious: the central compositions, once established, did not change. Of course there were innumerable shifts in color, in line, in mood, but the substance of the paintings, once laid down, was not subject to revision. Like the obdurate and beautiful stones in a river, the form is washed over, winnowed by time and reinforced at the rate of algae. It is clear why Nozkowski stuck with a more intimate scale, one where the stakes were just as high, but the form was infinitely malleable. His humble cosmos required a certain speed, a certain vulnerability.

The smaller panels each seem like urgent visions in their own way. There is a purple form with cobra-like wings of light blue and Prussian green cantering in the yellow ground, a gas flame surrounding its dance. There is a gray cliff and a gray foreground, a white orb growing between them, thick like mayonnaise or sunblock. There is a stubby blue form cradled by yellow and red strokes: an oasis in the desert, a view of the sky through blonde locks. There is a swerve of blue against a polluted yellow, like the beak of a dainty bird or a messy logo. There is, finally, an exuberant plant leaping into the frame, subdued by some varnish, but still pointy and round in its variegate growth.

Because they are worlds unto themselves, the best of these works have nothing at all to describe, having absorbed the feeling of various referents and transmuted them to pure shape and color. In one, there is an irregular black void, a thin purple lolling out to its right, and a horned orange to its left. Circumscribing the whole thing is a light blue bubble, one sharp corner drawing a tangent through the purple and orange, and, on the other side, braiding a curving border against the unnameable ground. It has the sense of growing into and against itself, a picture resulting from the competing forces of expansion and definition. Notice, too, the heart-shaped design in a 1986 panel, how its black-and-white cookie center comes so close to the edge, the gravity of the entire picture resting on that curve. There is also a weirdly expressive panel, a set of two concentric ovals in a wet field of brown, alternating black and white, red and blue, like crazed cartoon eyes with sticky tears. They have a raw incipience to them, an undeniable movement in the glaze.

The painting in the show that might be the most classic example of “a Nozkowski” is, like the others, untitled. Its multiple boomeranged shapes of orange, turquoise, and maroon are all balanced precariously in a pinkish form, its curves sided by swampy fins, the whole mass floating in a grayish purple. The interior components—the translucency of orange, the clear turquoise—read like sheared channels in a gemstone, and the external shapes—modest curves fragmenting into geometry—could be of this world. That is the most you can ask of abstraction, that its borders share an externality with the same air we breathe. Nozkowski’s mature work is all about that border, where believable outcroppings reveal a core even more surprising than a geode. What exactly is the substance filling these forms? A bowling pin tottering forward, a tongue scraping against the teeth to enunciate, a ghoulish apparition bursting forth. It originates in itself, this tumescence romping with diacritics, these fungal ligatures.

I can’t help but think of Donald Barthelme’s 1966 story “The Balloon,” in which the narrator, frustrated with his partner’s temporary absence, inflates a giant form stretching from 14th Street to Central Park. To some, “the apparent purposelessness of the balloon was vexing,” while, to others, the balloon was “part of a system of unanticipated rewards.” And, as it expanded into and against the city, the balloon became a source of wayfinding. In its “sorties” and “movements on a map,” it was pleasing especially “to people whose lives were rather rigidly patterned, persons to whom change, although desired, was not available.” It “offered the possibility, in its randomness, of mislocation of the self, in contradistinction to the grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet.” He calls the walnut and yellow mass “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure.”

What would it mean for a painting to be described as disclosure, a hardening of a specificity, but also a lightness? It goes back to the thing-ness of this whole thing, the perception of certain forms as having agency based on certain characteristics. The thingliest paintings are worked-over, messy surfaces that cohere into ecstatic designations that are felt, not named. No coincidence that thing, in Old English, meant meeting, assembly, matter. Nozkowski’s paintings can conflate a speck of dust with the dimple in an old smile. The optical ringing that they create, clarion also in the shoulder and wrist, is worth more than words.