Thomas Nozkowski: Paintings

Tom Nozkowski's death in May 2019 deprived of us of one of the most original, inventive, and fascinating painters working today. His small abstractions are odd, beautiful, beautifully constructed, and both exquisitely and roughly painted. They are also ferociously intelligent, funny, and, as it turns out, unforgettable. His paintings and drawings command our attention with their mysterious imagery, with their range of paint applications, with the delicacy of their incidents, and with their surprising color, yet at the same time, they seem about to escape our grasp. Nozkowski's unnameable images seem to be very specific but impossible to pin down.

The author of these oddball works shared many of his paintings' qualities, plus irresistible charm. Like his paintings, Nozkowski (b. 1944) could seem deceptively offhand, someone who took his work very seriously indeed but didn't take himself all that seriously. His comments about art were seasoned with throwaway lines like "Why two, if one will do?" and something about oil paint's being "the queen" of materials. His enigmatic abstractions combined discoveries that emerged from the act of making and distillations of experience—ranging from things glimpsed to things read, and much, much more, including fragments of movie plots. Nozkowski made powerful images "about" arcane books on science and walks through the city. No wonder his paintings seem particular and at the same time, unnameable. They are particular, just unidentifiable by us ordinary mortals. (I recall his saying that sometimes he found himself unable to remember exactly what had triggered a particular configuration, but if it still seemed resonant, he could use it.) "So when I deal with something that's a source, it's very specific," Nozkowski told Robin Scher in an interview for ARTnews in 2016, "and you have the source-driven moves—shapes, colors, compositional devices. And then when you're doing it and you think, 'You know what would be great? A purple triangle in the upper left-hand corner.' Then I think, 'OK, can I fit that into the narrative?' What does that mean? Why do I want to see that shape, that color in this particular structure?"

The sense of discovery that animates Nozkowski's work makes repeated motifs seem newly invented each time. There are family resemblances among groups of paintings and works on paper—shared memories of the grid, repeated structures or background patterns—but color in each work is always unpredictable and every configuration seems unprecedented and indescribable: hors catégorie, like the steepest routes in bicycle races. But, of course, their author was himself hors catégorie—only someone with a mind as well furnished as Nozkowski's, informed by his particular experience, and open to the possibilities suggested by his apparently limitless ways of putting on paint could have invented (or discovered) these images. Still, we recognize similarities and near-reprisals of motifs. "There are things that keep repeating, things you maintain an interest in," Nozkowski said in ARTnews. "They seem less like solutions as they do the interesting questions. It's not like, 'Oh, this color will fix every picture, so I can use it all the time.' It's more, 'This color is such a mystery, such a question for me that I can keep asking it, keep pushing at it to find a resolution.'"

Nozkowski said that he loved drawing "more than anything in the whole world." His works on paper are as compelling and complete as his canvases. But they are never preparations or studies for paintings. "I do two kinds of drawings," he told Dylan Kerr in Artspace. "The first are standalone drawings that are multimedia—crayon, graphite, colored pencil, ink, anything—that tend to be fairly small, under 11 × 14 inches." But there are also larger works perhaps best described as paintings on paper. "I'll be working on a painting for many months and something interesting happens in the painting that I know I'm going to get rid of, that's not going to stay," Nozkowski explained. "It's just a moment in the life of the painting. I'll take the paint that's on...