Much of contemporary painting has reverted back to foreground, middle ground, and background tropes. Representation, figuration, and subject matter reign. Issues matter. Yes, Clement Greenberg was fiction but is what we have now any better? The problem is our eyes see fast. We instantly assimilate images and quickly become bored. Rehashing visual conventions are often unsuccessful and, to be fair, most abstraction is a regurgitation of the past too. Art is no longer the zeitgeist it once was. Besides Jackson Pollock, the closest the art world had to putting an artist on the cover of Time Magazine was either Jeff Koons or Matthew Barney. That time has past. Beeple stirred a bit of controversy but, for most people, it's more engaging to swipe left and swipe right. In this sea of the new normal, painting doesn't care. Painting is still, quiet, and anachronistic. Even so, the paintings of Thomas Nozkowski's make quite a noise, the antithesis of Rothko's vibrating hum. Spirituality is replaced by transgression, uncertainty, and the chattering of teeth. If art mirrors our times, Nozkowski's pulse was prescient, aligned more with the existential angst of Jordan Wolfson and Neo Rauch than with his own generation. Thomas Nozkowski's paintings are not "a celebration of form and color." He plows through abstract expressionism and minimalism with a sneer. He's inspired by the slippage between thoughts, images, things, and patterns. Nozkowski's paintings do something. They function. Some paintings exhibit a perverse humor. Their enigmatic presence is remarkable considering they're directly and simply painted on a small scale. In an age of oversized art in oversized galleries, Nozkowski's honest work shuns grandiosity, like Vemeer's, "The Lacemaker" mocking David's histrionic, "Coronation of Napoleon". One of Nozkowski's predecessors is Myron Stout, whose black & white paintings cohabit a space between abstraction and non-representaion. Google search Stout's "Untitled", 1957 - 1968, at the Yale University Art Gallery. Like Nozkowski's work, it's a small oil painting, consisting of a white "V" shaped figure on a black ground. Myron Stout's "Untitled", is simple in form but, "What is it?" "What's it doing?" The white shape is simultaneously flat and deep, receding and advancing, every rounded corner different from the next. Stretching. Pulling. Doing no-thing. Its graphic simplicity resists assimilation. At 5:20, Nozkowski's, "Untitled", takes Stout's "V" and turns it into a right angle swimming pool in the middle of a Van Gogh wheatfield. Disagree and you'd be correct. The painting just sits there, neither affirming nor denying your thoughts because, of course, painting does none of these things. It's neither a representational take on Myron Stout's "V" nor an abstraction. Like the shutter of a camera lens, it closes, resisting interpretation. Not to be outdone, at 3:20, is a simple lime green shape on a grey background. Empty of detail and minimal in construct, it is perhaps the most vexing painting in the show. Is it a pixelated artichoke? Nothing coalesces. Questions beget more questions. Like many of Nozkowski's paintings, the image is unpinnable and is frankly, odd. In another "Untitled" painting at 3:08, the painting is both a cartoonish take on Hokusai's, "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" and a character from Dr. Seuss... 'Clark' in the park. There are other painters whose work shares an affinity with Nozkowski. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Forest Bess, and Gertrude Abercrombie were artists who also worked on a small scale outside the mainstream. Their internal dialog with the world couldn’t care less about the official canon of art history. Thomas Nozkowski's vision was no less singular. We were lucky to have him.