The lessons broadcast in recent Stellas, or Williamses, and still others of a whole phalanx of classicists who refuse to regard color merely as a descriptive feature of shape and plane, appear to have been taken to heart in the handsome new paintings of Larry Zox. His present exhibition at the Kornblee Gallery, of work from the past year, indicates a striking evolution in his compositional method. Preferring large, squarish canvases with stronger horizontal thrusts, Zox has revised his initially strictly-applied quadrant divisions (in swastika or pinwheel configurations) into something testier and more flexible. The four-part system is still visible through the antiseptic yet personal color, yet, now, it is used to establish geometrical patterns in which lozenge forms, and altered criss-crosses (of unprimed canvas) posit powerful and dense color halations or even optical morphoses. The color, in short, is now freed to act dramatically, dimensionally, while the enframing elements (the canvas paths) affirm two-dimensional experiences, or, at best, spatial schema securely anchored in two-dimensional conventions such as isometric perspective. Zox’s supple, serial images owe much of their success to his considerable technical prowess and, reductive means notwithstanding, his new paintings reveal an accomplished artist of chaste vigor.

—Robert Pincus-Witten