There is a work of the negative in the image, a “dark” efficacy that, so to speak, eats away at the visible.1
      – Georges Didi-Huberman

The significance of images is on the surface.2
       – Vilém Flusser

There is a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans have evolved to see and that we call visible light (roughly 750–380 nanometers). At one extreme is an even narrower band we call violet (roughly 430–380 nanometers), the shortest wavelengths our eyes can perceive. Beyond that is ultraviolet light; shorter still are X-rays; and, at the far end of the spectrum: gamma rays—the stuff of radioactive decay, supernovae, and quasars. Nick Schutzenhofer’s spare but deep palette—on display once again in his third solo exhibition at Mickey in Chicago—is dominated by this color, poised at the very limit of our perception. It permeates the room and unites a body of work remarkable for the variety of materials and techniques deployed in its creation, as well as the ways it interrogates, even antagonizes, visuality as we know it today.

        A rectangle of negativity, full of emptiness, frontal, obtrusive, and imposing, it featured prominently in Schutzenhofer’s previous solo show and has become somewhat of a signature motif for the artist. Centered all the more for being slightly off-center, in Untitled (53 x 66 ¾ inches) it presents as a plum-gray stain around which orbits a constellation of gestural marks the hue of a Concord grape’s waxy bloom. To the right is a spasm of slashes, dabs, and daubs that coalesce to become a figure, if just barely. Pressed precariously between the void and the edge of the canvas, on the cusp of oblivion, it reminds me of a Michelangelo non finito, abandoned in its struggle to emerge from the stone in which it is trapped, as much as it does the poor astronaut in Stephen Hawking’s example of how a black hole warps space, time, and the mind. As they approached the event horizon, the boundary of the region from which not even light can escape, time would slow down for the astronaut, though they wouldn’t notice it at first; but as they were stretched and crushed, disintegrating into a stream of subatomic particles, to the distant observer, the astronaut’s image would remain frozen. “Thus, by jumping into a black hole one could ensure that one’s image lasted forever, but the picture would fade very rapidly and grow so dim that no one could see it.”3

        It is this painting that beckons to me from across the gallery. The void within the picture upon the wall inside the room: if not infinite, it is still some kind of regress that I fall into. Containing both figure and void, the representational and the non-objective, it is the crux of the exhibition, and it nearly brings me to tears.

        There are other paintings, of course. In Untitled (48 ½ × 58 ¼ inches), the rectangle of negativity is an area of wash, a zone of erasure. It is set within a field of marks whose juice-like fluidity contrasts their conspicuously mechanical application. The ribbony strokes, one right after the other, of about the same width and length, hang vertically, while the marble-dust ground radiates as if behind amethyst crystals. Dilute as it is, the paint pools, throwing into stark relief the rich crenulation of the sewn and impastoed substrate, much like a rubbing might. A draftsman at heart, Schutzenhofer half-jokingly describes his method as “six months and fifteen minutes.” By this he means that the majority of the time he spends on a painting is in preparing its surface. Compared to the deliberateness with which his substrates have been built, what happens on top, the drawing, appears utterly spontaneous, almost evanescent.

        The painting’s neighbor on the wall is the smaller Untitled (27 ⅛ × 34 ½ inches), a seemingly half-finished genre scene in which one figure, eyes closed, dissolves into a shadowy chair, while another figure stands awkwardly against a pushy block of alizarin crimson. In such proximity, the rectangles of negativity in the two larger paintings become figures in their own right, or signs for figurability as such. In the blankness of the rectangles lies the figure’s potential: the possibility of figure and ground; in the residue the rectangles frame: the figure disfigured, reconstituted, dispersed, becoming ground—more regress.

        Two paintings, both untitled and measuring 53 × 67 inches, are distinct for the encaustic in which they are encased. Each features a quasi-floral motif inspired by Édouard Vuillard’s depiction of wallpaper, wherein pattern as ground envelopes the figure; or dissolves the distinction. In one, the floral motif is partly obscured by a piece of cardboard—a literal object interrupting the pictorial space—that seems to have absorbed some kind of an accident in sap green; in the other, the floral motif hovers over a caliginous blob, a lava field of mars black, ultramarine, lavender, and periwinkle—a hot mess. In this pair, chaos, if it doesn’t reign, at least has more of a say in the matter. Clumsy and disorganized, they’re less successful individually and for that reason are supported rather than complemented by the works with clearer internal logics in their approach to material, process and form.

        If there is a way in which the brute materiality of Schutzenhofer’s art can seem self-conscious, even over-determined, it may have something to do with how it calls forth the digital—and, by extension, Big Tech—if only by sheer contrast, a point I will return to later. In Untitled (18 ½ × 22 ½ inches), itself the size of a rectangle of negativity, the organic overflows the grid. A structure of repeated cells, removed by the artist, has created a crumbling cast of encaustic squares interspersed with flecks of color over bare linen. The phantom grid imposes a sense of command missing in the other two encaustics and conjures sci-fi control panels or pixelation as it might appear zoomed in at something like three thousand percent.

        Along with silicon (microchips, fiber optics), plastic is the material of our time; it’s ubiquitous, ambient. As you read this, plastic particles called microplastics (smaller than five millimeters) and nanoplastics (smaller than one micrometer) rest upon the deepest ocean floor, 4 drift aloft in the stratosphere,5 are pumped through our hearts in the blood in our veins, and accumulate in our brains.6 Many painters work in plastic in the form of acrylics, but with Untitled (29 x 41 inches), by deploying it as the ground in the form of Tyvek, a paper-thin material developed by the petrochemical company DuPont and used in a variety of applications such as PPE, packaging, and construction, Schutzenhofer takes the art of the synthetic long-chain polymer to another level. It’s a wonder more artists don’t work this way. Over the minute grid pattern pressed into the white sheeting, cryptic slashes and puddles of a deep purple pigment and epoxy resin—plastic on plastic—turn incandescent, glow as if switched on, and seem to affirm Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s claim in Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime that painting, “especially nonrepresentational painting, can nowadays only refer to the colors of plastic/color photography/video, either affirmatively or by ignoring them: their presence is implicit. Having replaced the colors of nature, they are the naturalized intensities that now constitute the colors of everyday life.”7

        Whether it’s ochre on a cave wall, silver emulsion, or liquid crystal displays, visual cultures have always been inseparable from the materials and technologies that enable them. Thinking beyond color, if I were to hazard a declaration like Gilbert-Rolfe’s, twenty-five years later, it might go something like this: painting, of any kind, can nowadays only refer to digital images, the devices that facilitate their display, and the algorithms that determine their dissemination. In this light, the negativity of Schutzenhofer’s rectangles is the three-fold darkness that lurks behind all digital images. It is the immateriality of code and the masslessness of the pixel, which is to say, light, the medium, ultimately, of all images; it is the blank, inert object, the screen itself, connected to a vast digital infrastructure of cell towers, satellites, and datacenters; and it is the nefariousness with which corporate entities monetize our distraction,8 creating a nebulous cloud of stimuli and desire, a black hole, toward which our attention helplessly gravitates, in which our minds become lost, by which our lives are consumed.

Curtis Anthony Bozif is a Chicago-based visual artist and art writer. He earned his BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. His interests include environmental aesthetics, ecology, natural history, deep time, and technology. He has written for Newcity, Bridge, and the Chicago Reader.

Footnotes:

1 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005) 142-143.

2 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 8.

3 Stephen Hawking, “Thus, by jumping into a black hole one could ensure that one’s image lasted forever, but the picture would fade very rapidly and grow so dim that no one could see it.” A Brief History of Time, directed by Errol Morris, 36:45, Anglia Television/Gordon Freedman Production, in association with NBC, Tokyo Broadcasting System and Channel 4, 1991, https://www.errolmorris.com/film/bhot.html

4 Shiye Zhao, Karin F. Kvale, Lixin Zhu, et al., “The distribution of subsurface microplastics in the ocean,” Nature, accessed December 2, 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08818-1

5 Daria Tatsii, Silvia Bucci, Taraprasad Bhowmick, et al., “Shape Matters: Long-Range Transport of Microplastic Fibers in the Atmosphere” Environmental Science & Technology, accessed December 1, 2025, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c08209

6 Alexander J. Nihart, Marcus A. Garcia, Eliane El Hayek, et al., “Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains,” Nature Medicine, accessed October 30, 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1

7 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (New York: Allworth Press, 1999), 34.

8 See Burkeman, Oliver, “The attention economy is in hyperdrive’: how tech shaped the 2010s,” The Guardian, November 22, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/nov/22/attention-economy-in-hyperdrive-how-tech-shaped-2010s-oliver-burkeman, accessed December 15, 2025. Also, The Social Dilemma, directed by Jeff Orlowski, Exposure Labs, Argent Pictures, The Space Program, 2020.