The Pictorial and The Material

John Yau on Thomas Nozkowski's paintings:

Increasingly in his work, Nozkowski subverts a deeply held and long cherished goal in painting, which is the unity of the pictorial and the material.

...

[His] painting was a vehicle for acknowledging diference, rather than a means of seeking harmony. His exploration of the mechanics and materiality of painting and drawing has led him to resist developing a style or what could be called a signature form of unity.

I enjoyed Yau's assessment of Nozkowski. One thing I have observed in Nozkowski's work is a preference for the visual over the material. The decision making process evident appears driven primarily by painterly optics of "difference". While there is a level of material exploration, it has always struck me as subservient to these optics. This isn't meant as a slight against Nozkowski's considerable achievement but it is a more accurate description of his work.

The Problem with Modern Painting

Alex Bacon offers a succinct appraisal:

I think every observer of contemporary art sometimes wonders if warmed-over modernism is the only possibility left for abstract painting. Once the dominant expression of both the historical and the neo-avant-garde, but now pursued only by a select few, the mode feels locked into an endless repetition of long-tired tropes like objecthood, flatness, and material specificity; or else the esoteric investigation and extension of certain minor formal questions—what happens if the stretcher is placed this way, or made of this material, or put in dialogue with this kind of mark, and so on.

The entire essay is worth a read.

A Creative Person in Today's World

During the time I was working on Elegiac Cycle, I was trying to find out what it meant to be a creative person in today’s world, and that meant trying to reconcile Oscar Wilde and Theodor Adorno...

- Brad Mehldau in a sweeping essay about art, politics, and modernity

Cezanne's Paintings

In one telling of art history, Cezanne discovers the flatness of painting. He becomes a father figure for one of the major impulses in modernist painting. The progression of modernist painting in this narrative is towards an ever more abstract, flat surface with Picasso and Pollock reaching particular milestones and a host of monochrome and grid painters supporting the tradition along the way.

The problem I have with this reading is that it does not align with my experience of Cezanne's paintings. His paintings are not flat in their appearance or material construction, rendering his role in the story above moot. While it is true that Cezanne evades the linear perspective that much Western European painting predating him features, my experience of this evasion is not of flatness but of a hollowing out of linear perspective. The hollowing out recognizes the surface of the painting.

The Cezanne paintings in the MoMA are a good example of this quality. The uncertain, haphazard markings invite the viewer to reckon with the materials. In this way, the space becomes detached from perspective and the surface of the canvas becomes available. Cezanne offers the images of his subject matter to the material limits of painting. As a result, the image can feel tentative and empty but the painting feels revealed and full.

At issue in this description is ultimately a different description of art history. Rather than seeing Cezanne as the progenitor of modernist flatness, I see him as testing a limit in painting. That he tested this limit in such a through and unprecedented way is what makes him worth thinking about, and more importantly, looking at.