Thomas Nozkowski.

PaceWildenstein, New York NY April 4 * May 3, 2008

Philosophers of art have had a great deal to say about the relationship between visual pleasure and representation. Magisterially summing up this intellectual tradition, Michael Podro's book Depiction (1998) draws attention to the complicated ways in which we respond to pictorial content. "Paintings address us, and they do so in part through creating uncertainty" as we bring into focus their subjects. "Our engagement with them," Podro adds, "involves a continuous adjustment as we scan them for suggestions on how to proceed and for confirmation or disconfirmation of our response." Podro was primarily concerned with old master art, but his analysis happily provides one key to Thomas Nozkowski's abstract pictures.

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Thirty-four years ago Nozkowski made an important choice. At that time, when painting was marginalized, he decided to work small on canvas board, an inexpensive material associated with amateur artists, making art for domestic settings. The 19 paintings in this show all are 22 by 28 inches, while the 20 drawings are a little larger, 22 by 30 inches. How very varied are these pictures: Untitled (8-94) (2007) shows a multicolored shape, something like the form of a head, as figure on a ground. In Untitled (8-92) (2007), a broad black striped ribbon runs across the bottom of the painting. Then Untitled (8-104) (2008) divides the canvas horizontally roughly at the middle, with curiously gawky lines at either end of a narrow ladder running across the center. And in Untitled (8-93) (2007), a large round form composed of concentric circles of color seems to roll, left to right, across a background ground. Nozkowski occasionally also does all-over compositions, like Untitled (8-96) (2007) in which horizontal stripes of many colors run behind oddly shaped vertical black constructions. Then in its visual partner, Untitled (8-101) (2008), vertical black ribbons separate pale-colored stripes. Nozkowski's paintings are hard to describe and--this is worth noting--also difficult to remember. They are not elegant, nor are they predictable. He never has fallen into the trap of a signature style. If now and then something recognizable appears, a dog in Untitled (P-38) (2008) or a tree stump in Untitled (8-88) (2007), this content seems mostly a function of our powers of projection. Whatever their sources, Nozkowski's are purely abstract pictures.

Painting was marginalized in the 1970s and '80s in part because no one, neither the artists nor their champions, offered a convincing history of abstraction. Once Clement Greenberg's vision of modernism no longer commanded assent, many attempts were made to re-interpret abstract art. Some painters borrowed from poststructuralist writing; others, David Reed and also Frank Stella, linked abstract art to old master art. Still other artists wanted to make abstraction a form of decoration, modeled, perhaps, on Islamic ornamentation. In the end, however, none of these ways of going about business carried conviction. Nozkowski, who loves to read and has catholic tastes in art of all periods, has never, so far as I know, theorized, beyond saying that his art always has its source in his direct visual experience. And so it is unsurprising that this painter's painter has taken a while to achieve the recognition that he deserves. I have known Nozkowski for 28 years, written about him repeatedly and seen many exhibitions of his paintings. How marvelous, finally, to see him at this grand gallery! Obviously PaceWildenstein is not anyone's domestic setting. But as we all know, the political history of art's displays is often complex. I happened to see this exhibition coming from the Whitney Biennial, a depressing monument to an exhausted ideal: anti-aesthetic art. Nothing there one would want to take home. We Americans live, it is true, in hard times, but it does not follow that we are condemned to what the catalogue calls "lessness [...] constriction, sustainability, nonmonumentality, antispectacle, and ephemerality." On the contrary, what we need more than ever right now are the visual--living, hence political--pleasures of aesthetic art.

Chardin's Cat with Ray, Oysters, and Terrine, Podro writes, "is in dialogue with its subject, its suggestiveness the product of tact not represssion." In 1728, painters could rely upon this dialectical relation between representation and its subject to create aesthetic experience. But nowadays, that no longer is possible. There are, to be sure, a few magnificent figurative artists--Catherine Murphy, to cite a very distinguished example. But on the whole, that tradition no longer commands satisfaction. And so our aesthetic artists face a difficult situation. If they make self-sufficient fine designs, then their art will be merely decorative. What they must do, then, if they are to survive in our visually busy environment, is create images that compel attention. Like Sean Scully, his exact contemporary, Nozkowski does that by attaching his images to reality. But where Scully replicates the rhythms of urban culture with his signature stripes, Nozkowski takes his subjects from upstate rural New York. Who would have prophesized that abstraction made possible such very dissimilar modes of aesthetic pleasure?