The Brooklyn Rail

The obscurity of the title of this exhibition does not detract from the crystalline clarity of the works within, fine paintings by four artists who are responding, in various ways, to the work of the late Thomas Nozkowski (1944–2019). The show fills three rooms of Art Cake’s Sunset Park ground floor and features a generous thirty-seven works and one construction by New York-based artists Louis Block (b. 1995), Joseph Brock (b. 1993), Jodie Manasevit (b. 1951), and David Dixon (b. 1968). Dixon curated the show and built the dividers in the second room.

There is a video that intermittently fills the left wall of this second room. Shot by Nozkowski’s son Casimir in 2007 and titled Thomas Nozkowski on a Hike, the seven-minute-and-forty-second-long handheld film sees father and son tramping through the artist’s beloved lower Catskills landscape in Ulster County, giving viewers the opportunity to see nature through the artist’s eyes. The film shows us a walk through a disused quarry, where, like Robert Smithson wandering through Passaic in September 1967, Nozkowski finds compositions and interest in the most mundane of natural and postindustrial scenery. He displays a Pre-Raphaelite degree of attention to the seemingly random details of the landscape, the very mise-en-scène that collaborated with him for decades. Nozkowski’s approach to his environment recalls John Ruskin’s 1843 injunction to young artists in volume one of Modern Painters to

go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.

Nozkowski appears as an elemental character at ease in a markedly antipicturesque landscape. He disavows the panoramic view established by Hudson River School artists, sticking to the immediate and the particular. Yet Nozkowski’s resulting pictures do not suggest the magnification of minutiae, but rather an ability to visually organize found forms and then translate them to his rigidly sized canvases. His works very rarely have internal painted framing devices—they exist as fields of perception. Sometimes they appear to be amalgamations of two or three paintings that act almost symbiotically, discrete elements that somehow harmonize like lichen or moss on metal and stone as seen in the film. Horizons are rarely suggested in Nozkowski’s work. They are more like a bird’s eye view from some six feet high, looking down but not subjecting nature to the traditional lens of art—such a difficult challenge. But they are never comprehensively abstract, either.

Take Untitled (9-29) from 2014, which shares the wall on which the film is projected. It bears a series of angular black-and-white striped and checked passages on a lilac background striated by burnt orange lines that run diagonally from upper left to bottom right. Or is the lilac the foreground? The orange lines and the black-and-white stripes at times line up and at others do not. There are forms at the bottom that appear legible: a 5 or S followed by a 0 or O and then a T. The black-and-white shape on top looks like the Mušḫuššu dragon images symbolic of the god Marduk from the Ishtar Gate in ancient Babylon—a scrawny mélange of snake, eagle, lion, and scorpion. This is a reference that could not be further from Nozkowski’s conception, of course, but it lends a stateliness to the canvas.

The far wall in gallery three twins Nozkowski’s Untitled (9-49) from 2015 with Manasevit’s Cha Cha of 2011. They hang pendant but just off center to the right, so as to direct vision to the far right corner, making friends with Manasevit’s very beautiful Due North (2025), a picture just half their size on the adjacent wall. This is the closest thing to a recognizable landscape in the show, with its late-Marsden-Hartley palette: the lower two thirds read as water dappled by a wintry mix and the upper section is bisected by a lowering expanse of purple sky above a horizontal bank of aquamarine. Untitled (9-49) is a slate-colored canvas overlaid by a large, grounded X-shape slightly right of center, whose upper arms fall short of the top edge. The design resembles a crude flag, or the marking of a sports field seen from above. The thin lines are made up of blurred bands of pigment, as if there is a speckled color field picture beneath this gray scrim. With its sweeps of falling vertical gray paint, it feels like being behind a waterfall (think Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans) or inside one of Umberto Boccioni’s “States of Mind” pictures. Manasevit’s delightful Cha Cha has a mottled marigold background that responds to five stalky, vertical, and expansive forms in orange, red, and pink that bar the canvas. They seem to sway in an imagined breeze, but their acceptance of a head-on view as in an elevation in architectural drawing connects them to landscape in a way Nozkowski’s works hardly ever allow.

Block’s meticulously designed pictures are all landscape format ovals, low and wide. Three are watercolors and five are oils. They recall Picasso’s inventive ovals of 1912 when he transitioned from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism, and also Barkley L. Hendrick’s jewel-like ovoid Jamaican landscapes, while the admirable clarity of their internal forms and saturated colors links them to graphic design from the 1960s and 1970s—the famed Woodstock poster with its stark guitar and dove comes to mind. Meanwhile, Brock’s pictures are the most heavily worked, the artist employing acrylic, crayon, and colored pencil in slabs that hang over the edges of the support. There is a ghostliness in the imagery, as in Outer Virgulas (S.1) of 2024 and its related works hanging in gallery three. One even entombs some scraggly strands of red hair in its encaustic-like surface. In the center of gallery two Dixon has repurposed walls from a previous show, brusquely repainted them, and hung his own and Manasevit’s works on their colored surfaces atop niches that previously held pictures. It calls to mind the fragments of buildings reconfigured in Gordon Matta-Clark’s works such as Bingo (1974), as well as the way that Christopher Williams uses walls from his prior shows in subsequent exhibitions.

When Casimir Nozkowski asks his father, “What makes this a landscape?” in the film, Tom replies, “A quality of logic on the point of dissolution. Formlessness on the point of becoming something.” This, along with a resistance to perceivable scale, is the key to the artist’s illusionism—the jumps of vision among planar elements, and the resulting middle ground between the reconcilable and the disharmonious. This was how Nozkowski conceived a new vision of the world. And his oblique impact on generations of artists, as seen in this worthy show, parallels the way Ruskin’s writings empowered the originality of the Pre-Raphaelite artists in 1848, a continued generosity of visual approach.