Robin Scher interviews painter Thomas Nozkowski on the occasion of his exhibition of Works on Paper at Pace Gallery, New York, on view through March 26, 2016.

Nozkowski remarks: "We tend to get obsessed with language and the information that can be carried by language. But I think long before men spoke, certainly before they wrote things down, they had a visual language and understanding of the world. A certain color meant a certain kind of weather was coming, a broken branch meant lunch just walked by. Or even—this is one that always gets me—you’re standing on a street and you’re looking three blocks away and there’s this little moving dot and somehow you just know it’s your best friend. There’s no way you could see enough to know that, but somehow by the presence of this dot in the world, you can read it. I think that’s our deep understanding of the visual of the world."