Installation shot, Alex Katz, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, September 5 to October 5, 2012

In keeping with Dave Hickey’s idea of art writing being commensurate with playing air guitar – “flurries of silent sympathetic gestures with nothing in their heart but the memory of the music” – then the appropriate motions for Alex Katz’s paintings would be a poetic finger-snapping ring-a-zing zing or lyric hip-wiggling. The words that could accompany Katz’s paintings include “lyrical,” “cool,” “chilled” and “rhythmic”: all modes that are equally used to describe music, and perhaps even being by the sea – the theme to one of his two shows on these shores. Recent paintings at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London followed by a compact collection in Margate’s Turner Contemporary provide a clearer view of the artist’s elegance.

At Turner Contemporary a corridor of small paintings is sandwiched by two big galleries with generally larger and more recent works. Flowers, landscapes, night themes and portraits in the corridor, spanning a forty-year period, offer a gemlike walk though various ideas in the artist’s career. This small grouping, in fact, becomes a retrospective within the exhibition demonstrating the breath of his themes but also the consistency of his vision through the years. A small early collage Sea Land Sky (1959) provides a glimpse of Katz’s reductive thinking early on. Essentially just three bands of color: a gray rectangle, a cool blue middle band, flat at the top edge and undulating at the lower edge, with a blue green bottom third implying the land. It evokes the simple, contemplative seascape that one imagines. Sea Land Sky is a good example of how Katz is able to use the bare minimum, color, line and edge in this case, to evoke place and mood.

During a talk at the gallery, Katz described the ethos of his work as having grown out of a response to the existential nature of Abstract Expressionism. In that regard, his light touch offers a strong counter solace to the action painter’s angst. Pleasure and ease, his painting seems to suggest is just as important a quality of life as the raw meditation on existence; and what better balm for raw existence than languishing by the beach. Give Me Tomorrow, a collaboration between Tate St. Ives and Margate Contemporary, two venues in English seaside towns, brings together predominantly large images of ocean themed paintings. In the large galleries at Margate, Katz’s subjects play, swim, sail, sit on the beach; they are entirely languid in their presentness, probably being caressed by a warm sea breeze. The most compelling piece actually offers very little in terms of image, or, for that matter, human beings. Beige Ocean (1999) is a painting of surf or waves. Composed of whites, creams, faint yellows, and a few diagonal brushes of paint to evoke the bubble and spray of surf and ocean motion. Here it is the faint gestures and close color tones that bring about the sense of fluid motion but also the emotional calm of the sea. This creamy painting is like a Chinese scroll offering nature for contemplation, and from that point of view, the Katz offers its viewer a foothold to being present.

Alex Katz, Sea, Land, Sky, 1959. Cut and pasted paper, 8-5/8 x 11 inches. © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Digital Image

Representing a place or time is not uncommon in figurative painting. But that impulse, when combined with the nature of Katz’s schematic approach (flat color, cool gesture), seems a world away from the plein air nature of, say, Impressionist painting. It is well known that his work is created through a methodical system, which involves a preparatory sketch, then a drawing, and a cartoon that helps to plan the painting. The actual painted act comes about rapidly with some improvisation, perhaps comparable to jazz where structure and improvisation work together. A twist of the hand, a moment in time, determine the tone of Katz’s efforts. His painted world though should be considered more than just luxe, calme et volupté, that hallmark of Matisse. It seems to me that the success and impact of a Katz painting depends on just this moment of presentness, what the artists himself calls painting in the “present tense.” Hence, being present, but one that is at ease, would seem to be his counter point to mere existential existence. His is a cool modernity.

Coda. The latest paintings, on view at Timothy Taylor’s in London, of flowers and portraits offers a new point of view for the octogenarian: a double portrait of the same person in a single frame. Take note that this is no Warholian repetition, rather the same model is depicted at close up and from distance, as well as from different angles. For example, a portrait of Ada, is a close-up of her glancing over her shoulder on the left, while there is a three quarter length view of her back on the right, or Chris, (2012), presents his subject nude on the left and her head painted on the right. Although apparently simple as an idea, given his conception of painting in the present tense, it subtly implies that two moments of time are presented in a singe frame. At least for this moment.

Give Me Tomorrow was at Tate St Ives, May 19 to September 23, 2012 and Turner Contemporary, Margate, October 6, 2012 to January 13, 2013.  Katz’s exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, was September 5 to October 5, 2012.

click to enlarge

until December 20

Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (8-44) 2002 oil on linen on panel, 16 x 20 inches Courtesy Max Protetch Gallery

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.

Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (8-50) oil on linen on panel, 22 x 28 inches Courtesy Max Protetch Gallery

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”.