Thomas Nozkowski
Drawings
January 23 to March 1,
2003
New York Studio School
8 West 8 Street, New York NY 10011
website with all images in the show, and texts by Barry Schwabsky, James
Hyde and Alexander Ross, David Cohen and Thomas Nozkowski, and archive
of criticism about the artist
www.nyss.org/nozkowksi
By JOE
FYFE
Thomas Nozkowski
Untitled (Z-6) 1987
oil on paper, 11 x 15 inches;
cover image: Untitled (S-63) 2002
ink and gouache on paper, 9 x 12 inches
This and all
images, courtesy of the artist and Max Protetch Gallery, New York
The key drawings in Thomas
Nozkowski's exhibition were hung just inside the entrance to the gallery.
S68, dated 1984, is a semi-abstract pictogram made from short brushstrokes.
The image is centered on a large empty field of white paper with what
appears to be diluted ink. It consists of an outline of indeterminate
shape, like that of a Midwestern state on a map. A thick line in a zigzag
pattern runs across the top half of this shape, a fragment of a decorative
motif. The drawing is reminiscent of the hesitant line drawings that
are common in archeology books, illustrating a found pottery shard.
Nozkowski's conception of what a painting or drawing is remains fairly
steady after 1984: an island of abstract invention, most typically an
arabesque, on a sea of accumulated paint. Looking to the right, Z6 from
1987 might be illustrating a bowl being formed on a wheel. Two thumb
like shapes seem to pull the background color forward, into the hollowed
out curved shape that dominates the foreground area, and the shape functions
like decorative detail flung onto an indeterminate space.
Thomas Nozkowski
Untitled (S-68) 1984
ink on paper, 11 x 14 inches
In the Jasper Johns' painting
from 1962, Fools House, the title of the painting is spelled out in
part on the upper right side of the painting and breaks off, only to
continue coming in from the top left side of the canvas. Critical writing
on this painting suggests that Johns meant to indicate a cylindrical,
not a flat space. I tend to see Nozkowski's space as spherical, or,
more precisely a fragment of a sphere, like a detail on the surface
of pottery, magnified inside of a rectangle. This is one of many odd
ways this artist has developed.
Nozkowski also seems to have managed to disregard the edges of the rectangle.
His format and compositional proportions come close to arbitrarily framed
fragments of decorative mosaic or fresco we sometimes see in ethnographic
museum installations. He seems to like the way things are unthinkingly
stuck inside frames.
Nozkowski's forbears are painters who ignore the boundaries between
what defines painting and drawing and use an abundance of art materials.
Giacometti is one example and de Kooning another: artists so preoccupied
with figure-ground that they let their paintings uncertainly approach
the edge of the rectangle. Similarly, in Nozkowski's work the background
painting is mostly an ambiguous space, but his space seems to tuck itself
under the edge of the rectangle and then continue a bit further.
There is something thrilling in the cranky insularity of what this artist
refuses to spend time considering. He pessimistically disregards compositional
airiness and breadth, two of the niceties of late modernism. There are
other moments here that are slyly savage. Z-83 can be interpreted as
a cynical rendition of Bill Jensen's early visionary style. No other
drawings here approach the uncharacteristic rhetoric of this shield-like
shape, done in ink and crayon, which barely contains an explosion of
white lines.
Thomas Nozkowski
Untitled (Z-83) 1990
ink and crayon on paper, 13 7/8 x 16 13/16 inches
Nozkowski is admired by painters
though the work is of a fundamentally disagreeable nature. In some cases
perhaps the adamant infantilism of his project is misread as affirmative
sensuality. Nozkowski's sheer perversity reveals a deep criticality,
a refusal of belief. There's none of the violent negations that spurred
minimalism, but a kind of aesthetic pack-ratism, anarchistic in its
exultant regressiveness. His working methodology is additive, brooding.
It is too bad there was not more of an overlap of this exhibition with
the Jean Fautrier show at Columbia, a dialogue between the spleen that
Nozkowski displays could have begun with an earlier French version.
Both artists are major painters with obscure reputations. They both
made relatively diminutive paintings marked by painting cuisine and
by their culpable negativity. Suffice to say that Nozkowski betrays
the American trait of ultimately distrusting materiality. Where Faurtrier's
work succeeds or fails on the contrasts between the build up of paint
and transparent linear washes and impasto, Nozkowski falls back on the
elegant line. In the end, his paint quality is harnessed by linear structure.
Still, Nozkowski's contribution is of a stature which prevents any serious
discussion of contemporary American painting from excluding him.
