Larry Zox’s paintings at Kornblee Gallery seem to be an attempt to expand the flat, hard-edged, heraldic painting into a mural idiom. The works from his Scissors Jack series are made up of V-shaped wedges which fit together to affirm not so much the flatness of the canvas, but the continuity of the wall along which the paintings’ eleven-foot widths are stretched. The wedges themselves are made up of wide bands of color whose horizontal edges are discontinuous from one wedge to the next, promoting a reading of the wedges as parallel to, but at varying distances from, the wall surface. Zox means to contradict this depth effect through the construction of the forms themselves, a construction which is clearly derived from the geometry of the picture’s shape. The formation of the wedges by a process of halving the surface and then projecting diagonals from the corners of the resultant rectangles can be read off from pencil lines that seem to project a blueprint of the painting’s dependence for incident on the shape of its support, thereby playing off structural apodicticity against the arbitrariness or contingency of illusionistic pictorial space.
Zox’s color however seems to vitiate the paintings’ original idea because the value-contrast between the bands within the wedges causes a sense of recession that renders the color tonal and rather dry. The most successful painting exhibited seemed to be from the earlier “Time” series, a work called Green Time, where the closeness in hue of the two major colors––a blackish green and a black-violet––created a contrast not between actual color but rather, as in Reinhardt’s black paintings, an almost abstract differentiation of coldness and warmth out of darkness.
—Rosalind Krauss
