Marilyn Lasarow, in her group of enamel-sprayed plexiglass paintings at Herbert Palmer, demonstrates that precise craftsmanship goes a long way indeed toward predisposing the critical eye in the artist’s favor. These Constructivist-inspired works, which she calls polyoptics, fall short of complete success largely on account of a tendency to overstatement.
Nearly all the works shown here are serial permutations of interlocking solid or striped geometric shapes, floating against clean monotonal color fields. Delimited thus, they are immediately perceived as emblems. Polyoptic Stripe #9 is one of several employing four red diamond shapes, with darker red edges denoting three-dimensionality, set against white. In this particular configuration a trapezoidal bar of red and blue stripes pierces horizontally through the central space defined by the red forms. There is a similar, less appealing series on grounds of deep yellow. Polyoptic Stripe #7 belongs to a group in white and grey against black. Here again, the artist juxtaposes solid and striped hard-edge shapes in variant organizations. One senses, in the subdued tonality of this group, a deliberate endeavor to achieve “seriousness” in terms of concentrated spatial ideation by avoiding highly sensuous color. The impulse to experiment in this direction is well-grounded, for Lasarow’s handling of color does not, for the most part, work instructively or logically in conjunction with the space-form ideas.
Possibly a similar intuition of partial failure in the emblematic works as a whole led Lasarow to reject this imagery in favor of an all-over, more purely abstract treatment of the plastic surface. Whatever the motivation, the latter approach, as realized particularly in Polyoptic Shilt #2 is considerably more promising. Here spatiality is merely suggested by the positioning of flat colored shapes, in contrast to the heavy-handed insistence on illusionistic edges in the previous works. The top of this square panel is deep navy blue, separated from a field of white by adjacent red, orange, yellow and blue bars in a wide line which steps down from left to right and, by implication, steps twice in and out.
—Jane Livingston
