KAREN WILKIN
121
The contemporary abstract painter, Thomas Nozkowski, is in his
own way no less gritty or single-minded than Eakins. At Max Protetch
Gallery, New York, he showed the most recent of a continuing series of
smallish canvases pitting a wide range of painting languages and what I
suppose must be called "pictorial strategies" against wry, ambiguous
images. In many, the unifying motif is a casual grid-broadly stroked or
wiry, dense or sparse, trued and faired or warped-against which larger
shapes or incidents are played. At times, Nozkowski seemed to map pic–
torial space, diagramming the way imposed elements distort the surface,
although there's nothing systematic about his idiosyncratic images.
Quite the opposite. Each seems to be a rethinking of what a picture
could be, although just what Nozkowski is up to remains indescribable.
Each painting is clearly an image derived from something or a fragment
of an impenetrable narrative, clearly rooted in specific experience, but
at the same time, unnameable, perhaps unknowable, like a portion of a
tale told in a language we don't speak. Klee's ghost haunts these pic–
tures, but so does a host of more boisterous precedents, everyday events
that we can't quite put our finger on. Scale shifts, suggesting landscape,
architecture, the tabletop. Color is unpredictable, ranging from tender
pastels to clear near-primaries to murky purple-browns.
One of the most compelling works in the show set a wonky blue rec–
tangle, overlapping a pair of transparent discs with delicate radiating
red lines, like high-style satellite dishes, against a yellowish grid .
Another, equally good, depended on a soft-edged, creamy "cloud,"
against and in which warped ovals, stuffed with other colors, like
pimento olives gone amok, assumed unpredictable configurations. As
usual, Nozkowski quietly impressed us with his intelligence and inven–
tiveness, momentarily dissembling the ambition and authority of his pic–
tures by their intimacy and modesty.
If
Nozkowski's paintings were assurance that the tradition of serious,
non-ironic abstraction is still vital, an exhibition of recent work by
Michael Steiner at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York, and an Isaac
Witkin mini-retrospective at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, were proof
that the equivalent in sculpture also flourishes. Steiner showed four–
square, stacked constructions, built, as they have been for several years,
out of sheets of steel pierced by rectangular grids or patterns derived
from his own drawings, like a child's strip of linked paper dolls or
snowflakes. In the best, unexpected overlaps and transparencies created
an unpredictable play of solid and void that enlivened the piled "cages"
perhaps most dramatically in a narrow, slightly twisted "tower" of com–
pressed cutouts, offset on an elevated "base." In another work, a row
