Larry Zox: Gemini by Berry Campbell Gallery

LARRY ZOX GEMINI

L A R RY ZOX I N H I S N E W YO R K S T U D I O, C . 19 69

LARRY ZOX GEMINI NOV EMBER 22 - DECEMBER 22, 2023

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Larry Zox: At the Edge

arry Zox (1937–2006) reveled in the painted surface for nearly fifty years, creating commanding pictorial expressions of color. Rarely does an artist deliver color like Zox: an aficionado of boxing and jazz, his colors can feel like a double punch, a jab of red followed by a right cross of yellow or orange; or like the overloaded harmonies, rhythmic syncopations, and tautness of jazz’s textures. As with boxing, jazz relies on stylized choreography, stealth moves away from a controlling tonality and melodic progression. In his robust color matrices, Zox doesn’t pull any punches, nor does he round out or disguise melodic and harmonic edginess. Zox’s career coincided with a time when a younger group of artists that included Zox, Frank Stella, and Kenneth Noland were turning away from the effects of the loaded brush and thick impastos to activate the surface. This new generation of artists created the foundation of a sensibility keyed to investigations of new ways of creating the illusion of space on a two-dimensional surface. Like his colleagues, Zox turned his early efforts to what it might mean to build a new kind of pictorial surface. While some of his painter-colleagues were fusing color and canvas through stain techniques to activate the surface of a painting’s material support, Zox—a self-described contrarian—went about challenging the continuity of stained and color-field surfaces through the use of collage, a medium that is something like the opposite of staining. “Being contrary

is the only way I can get at anything. This is not necessarily an arbitrary position; it means responding to something in an examination of it.”1 Zox in effect set out to rupture the vaunted unity of the surface by deconstructing it, and the intensity and focus of his relentless seeking yielded surfaces of remarkable interest and vitality. Beginning with a physical flat surface of jointed plywood, he seemed to tear it apart and then reconstitute it, fitting torn pieces of painted cardboard together, which he stapled onto an allover ground color (fig. 1). Banner, 1962, might be a cognate both for Franz Kline’s loosely geometric slathers and the collaged gestures of the rogue Abstract Expressionist painter, Conrad Marca-Relli. Always one to reveal his material means, Zox deployed a rectilinear format within which loosely rendered geometric forms were stapled to canvas in dissonant juxtapositions, the staples glaringly exposed. Banner marks out surface by juxtaposing elongated thick and thin forms, loosely painted on one side, in a way that echoes as well as incorporates the framing edge. These collaged elements prefigure the artistic concerns with edges that will dominate Zox’s paintings into the next decade. Within the year, Zox’s collages evolved from cut and stapled pieces to painted cuts, a transmutation of materials—the stapled paper pieces—into the material fusion of stretched canvas. By sublimating paper to a continuous canvas surface, Zox held to the notion that the spatial

FIG. 1. BANNER, 1962. COLLAGE WITH PAPER, OIL, STAPLES ON BOARD, 72 X 72 IN.

FIG. 2. FOR JEAN, 1963. ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 60 X 60 IN.

illusionism of “cuts” into space could be imagined as layered planes. The sectionalized parts fight to describe a unified surface that releases and compresses space, a surface that lives. In this way, Zox’s surfaces also read as temporal sites. That is, while his schema may be iterative— box after box describing vertical and horizontal registers—his colors mark out chromatic zones and spatial layers, as in For Jean, 1963 (fig. 2), where the “torn” edges of white shapes seem to overlay the black upper register. Even the red and green four-sided forms seem to perform spatial articulations of a similar kind but now based on the relay between hue and value. What is clear is that Zox understands color as a structuring force in the articulation and arrangement of surface elements. For even as the collage impulse forms the foundation of Zox’s paintings in the early 1960s, color is its thematic throughline with its own story to tell. Zox’s prising apart of the flat surface had signaled a process of material visualization he would rely upon moving forward. What appeared to be deconstruction—the undoing into pieces of the surface—was also a kind of literal reconstruction, or material acknowledgment, of spatial ambiguity inhering in the picture plane. He addressed and further clarified the formal problem of infusing a flat surface with illusory spatial characteristics by constructing three-dimensional versions of his images (fig. 3). These maquettes consisted of two literal planes, the first made of plywood affixed to the wall, the second of plexiglass, suspended one- and one-half inches in front of it.2 The planes were painted in such way that their superimposition created spatial registers, front and back, that would be fused in the final rendering. Zox explained: “Making myself clear is important. Thus, the particular way of executing a painting, which is ultimately a kind of object, too, must be a tectonic means which destroys the dilemma of the past generation. One approach is to use a mechanical format with x number of possibilities. Structure is evident and of course necessary, so that at times I must make something three-dimensional in order to put it down in two dimensions.”3 Green Rotation, 1965 (fig. 4), is part of Zox’s Rotation series, for which he had initially contrived joined planes literally projecting into space. In his final rendering on a notionally flat surface, these planes feel untethered from a stable central quadrilateral. Incursions of green wedge-shaped triangles at all four corners act to thrust what seemed to have once been wide, continuous horizontal color bands into vertiginous disequilibrium. Now angled off-kilter, the banding is disjointed, discontinuous with the controlling horizontal stripes at center. Zox reinforces this effect with the hue and value of its “wings”: an orange central band is now deepened toward a burnt umber, while Zox jumps the tips forward in a thrust of violet-pink. The yellow, and the orange band is tinted toward red. This shift in the tonal character of bands propels the centrifugal trajectories of the “wings’” rotation. The narrow channels between wings and center are masked off and painted white, indicating rifts between wings and center. That punch of violet-pink tipping the wings is prevented from becoming unmoored from the central form only by means of its relationship to the channels separating tinted yellow horizontal bands, in the upper and lower registers, from the variation of orange hue graded vertically dark to light. The apparent discontinuity of horizontality also signals spatial indeterminacy, suggesting tectonic rifts in a terrain—separate parts that paradoxically lock into a totalizing unity.

FIG. 3. PHOTOGRAPH OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL RENDERINGS OF PAINTINGS FROM ZOX’S “ROTATION” SERIES. LEFT: WHITE ROTATION II, 1964, ACRYLIC PLEXIGLAS AND MASONITE, 9¾ X 9¾ IN. RIGHT: WHITE ROTATION I, 1964, ACRYLIC PLEXIGLAS AND MASONITE, 14 X 16 IN.

FIG. 4. GREEN ROTATION, 1964, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 40½ X 42¼ IN.

FIG. 5. ORANGE MERINGUE, 1965. COLORED PENCIL AND GRAPHITE ON PAPER, 17⅛ X 22⅛ IN.

For subsequent series of paintings, Zox created preparatory drawings in graphite and colored pencil on graph paper rather than three-dimensional maquettes. Plotting in modules based on a “Scissor Jack,” form (fig. 5), Zox scaled up his drawing onto the flat canvas using a t-square and measuring stick. Replicated across horizontal registers in reverse mirror imaging, Zox’s a priori graphic system seemed ripe for the theoretical heft given it by Lawrence Alloway’s 1966 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, titled Systemic Painting. Alloway’s thesis was that young artists were now constructing their paintings by means of a priori compositional frameworks, “systems,” wherein, as Alloway stated, the “end-state of a painting is known prior to completion.” 4 Even so, Zox declared his color choices were “arbitrary” and “chosen randomly in the execution of the paintings.”5 Yet what caused the notionally flat plane to jump forward or skid sideways like optical beats— that forced planarity into dimensionality—was brought about by the way carefully tuned hue and value served Zox’s graphed structures. Artist Brice Marden called it “color situations.”6 Marcia Tucker, associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, called it “color structure,” the way in which an artist’s choice of colors established unity within the limits of the framing edges.7 Revealingly, the cover of the catalogue for her exhibition, The Structure of Color (1971), FIG. 6. THIRD ASTROLOGICAL SIGN OF THE ZODIAC: GEMINI. reproduced graph paper over which were

written the words “red, blue, orange, and green” in their respective hues. The literal naming of two primary colors and their complements points to the foundational harmonic relationship relied on for centuries in the history of Western art. For Zox, structure had been conceived as a representation of geometric vectors within which color choices supported design and directional force. Yet throughout the 1960s, Zox had also turned to a geometry of a different sort—one whose inhering property would appear to be stasis: a centrally positioned star-shaped concave polygon (e.g. Untitled, 1963, Plate 1) The form derives from the ancient astrological sign for Gemini, the third of the zodiac signs (fig. 6). Two parallel vertical lines symbolize various pairings in myth, capped above and below by bowed lines in reverse mirror image.8 Apparently full of rich implications for Zox, it became the principal carrier of content in his later series (1967—69), which he titled Gemini. Since Zox had averred in 1966 that the drawn line was structurally determining, and his colors were “chosen randomly,” the question arises: why fill in color at all? And yet, his commitment to broad, bright coloration (Zox would later add mica powder to enhance light effects) contests the idea that color is merely secondary or local. For Zox colors have always done more than fill in and affirm shape. With the Gemini series, Zox asserted that color itself had agency beyond the limits of the graphed armature that enclosed it: structure became a function of color. One hue next to or across from another would hold the surface, defining pictorial zones and their limits. But rather than merely filling the contours—a star shape, a triangle shape—Zox instrumentalizes color as an agent of shape: his colors seem to “aspire,” as Hubert Damisch averred, to form.9 And Zox used those color forms like a boxer choreographs punches or a jazz artist improvises riffs—to stun, astound, and overwhelm. The force of Zox’s color can feel like a body blow, causing the surface to expand and contract as tonal value, hue, and scale shift between elements. A saturated red might expand the flat plane or cause it to jump forward or fall back beyond the plane of the support. Red chroma in Untitled (c. 1969, Plate 3) seems frontal and aggressive, while the same shape in a tinted reddish maroon at smaller scale, shrinks and falls away as in Untitled (c. 1969, Plate 9). In the former work, the effect of a forward-shifting plane is aided by the high value of the paired yellow and taupe at right angles, top and side, which seem to recede, while the pair of blue and gray, bottom and left, match the density of the central form, weighting it leftward. This pair might have signaled a rightward rotation, but for the single channel of white between the gray isosceles triangle and bulging red star shape. That white opening unmoors the gray color shape, unlocking it from the whole by evoking space behind the image. In other paintings in the series, one’s perception of color forms might cause the plane to shift imperceptibly or, as in Untitled (c. 1969, Plate 4), maintain stasis. Here, the struggle for primacy between hues of similar value is subdued into optical stasis: the plane remains stable, for despite the dominant size of the central Gemini shape, its hue is perceived as the sum of the colors that enframe it. Zox also sometimes floats color, as in Palanpup [sic] (1967, Plate 6), its high-value blue releasing light into an effervescent atmosphere as it expands horizontally against bowed edges. Channels surrounding the

central form open onto raw canvas, enhancing the sense of liminal space that cause the complementary pairs of shaded blue and vibrant orange to recede behind the high value blue expanse. Although Zox had once referred to his white lines as “fill-ins”10 and had labeled them “separations” in select sketches for the Gemini series,11 these channels of white now catalyze further structural drama by creating a perception of depth behind the form, as in the effect of backlighting. The expansion of a single central form horizontally or vertically is Zox’s way of catalyzing a kind of chromatic shapeshifting among elements that destabilizes the plane. In the way that greater size tends to spread color and increase its intensity, so double and triple images increase rather than diffuse the vitality of Zox’s double and triple Gemini structures. In these FIG. 7. ALTO VELTO, 1969. ACRYLIC AND EPOXY ON CANVAS, 78 X 143¼ IN., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, pictures, phalanxes of the Gemini forms New York, Anonymous Gift, 1980, 80.2748 create vast expanses of event-driven color effects that ricochet across the surface. It’s as if zones of color move, propelled laterally and vertically by Quoted in Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America (October 1965): 55. Zox’s Untitled, 1964, a painting optical vibrations. Untitled (Triple Gemini) (c. 1969, Plate 5) is enriched from this series, headed her discussion of the “new sensibility” that favored reductive forms for their art. and activated by tonally graded color zones punctuated by moments of This description relies on that of James Monte, associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American sudden high value colors. The dramatic weight of the startling black Art, New York. He had given Zox a one-person exhibition there in 1973. See, James Monte, Larry Zox (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973), 9. central Gemini form presses the surface into concavity, made radiant in Quoted in Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America, see above, n1. Zox’s Untitled, 1964, a painting from the way that Manet used black as a form of luminosity rather than an this series, headed her discussion of the “new sensibility” that favored reductive forms for their art. absence of color. Lawrence Alloway, quotation from the Guggenheim archives, Amanda Brown, “Lawrence Alloway Several double Gemini paintings from 1969 (Plates 8 and 10) feature Installing Systemic Painting, 1966,” online at https://www.guggenheim.org/articles/findings/lawrence-alloway-installing-systemic-painting-1966. This statement does not appear in the catalogue for iterative color schemes that bounce color across an increased horizonthis exhibition. See Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim tal expanse like driving syncopations in jazz. And like the polytonality Foundation, 1966). of chords incrementally stacked in thirds, Zox fans out his color Ibid. Brice Marden, published artist statement, in Marcia Tucker, The Structure of Color (New York: Whitney scheme, accordion-like, in horizontal “stacks” of color harmonies, their Museum of American Art, 1971), 11. relational shifts creating a polyphony of rhythmic thrusts. Their impact Ibid., 5. on the viewer is unequivocally direct, as Zox describes it: “The color The literature on the pairings represented by this zodiacal sign is vast, but an introduction to sources tendency in the new paintings is more immediate insomuch as all the can be found online at https://www.britannica.com/topic/zodiac color is felt at once. The procedure for making these paintings is vital The concept of aspiring to or assuming form is taken from Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, specifically Chapter 2, “Our Sheet’s White Care” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 182 ff. See also to this thought. Everything is attempted at once.”12 Jeffrey Weiss’s discussion of Damisch’s idea in relation to Cy Twombly in “Cy Twombly,” Artforum 47, Zox’s son Alexander has spoken of the importance of edges in his no. 2 (October 2008):368–70. father’s life and work, describing them as the “node of his artmaking.”13 Larry Zox, quoted in Edward Bryant, Larry Zox (Hamilton, New York: Colgate University, Picker Gallery, 1969), unpaginated. White channels are prominent in the design (1968 –69) Zox created for the cover Zox paints close to the edge; those edges circumscribe color space as of the exhibition catalogue. it expands and contracts. His edges, then, are returned to a structuring See the sketch for Rota Murex, 1969, reproduced as the cover of the exhibition catalogue: Peter role, but as an ally of color. As Zox stated, “Structure, shape and color Schjeldahl, Larry Zox (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College, Jeffe-Friede Gallery, 1969). now have the same or equal momentum. Color is now visible, or the Larry Zox, Statement quoted in Diane Kelder, Zox70 (Akron: Akron Art Institute, 1971), unpaginated, note 6: “Statement in reply to question of the writer.” attitude of it becomes obvious.”14 1

5 6

— Patricia L Lewy, Ph.D. © Berry Campbell, New York

Alexander Zox, “A Son Reflects on Larry Zox and Their East Hampton Roots,” May 19, 2017, online at Hamptons Art Hub: May 19, 2017.

Larry Zox, written statement, Art Now: New York Vol. 1, no. 2 (February 1969): 6. This quote is cited in the exhibition catalogue for Zox70, note 5, unpaginated exhibition catalogue, as in note 12, above.

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ABOUT THE GALLERY Christine Berry and Martha Campbell opened Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013. The gallery has a fine-tuned program representing artists of post-war American painting that have been overlooked or neglected, particularly women of Abstract Expressionism. Since its inception, the gallery has developed a strong emphasis in research to bring to light artists overlooked due to age, race, gender, or geography. This unique perspective has been increasingly recognized by curators, collectors, and the press. Berry Campbell has been included and reviewed in publications such as Architectural Digest, Art & Antiques, Art in America, Artforum, Artnet News, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, East Hampton Star, the Financial Times, Galerie Magazine, Luxe Magazine, The New Criterion, the New York Times, Vogue and the Wall Street Journal. In September 2022, Berry Campbell moved to 524 West 26th Street, New York. The 9,000-square-foot gallery houses 4,500 square feet of exhibition space, including a skylit main gallery and four smaller galleries, as well as two private viewing areas, a full-sized library, executive offices and substantial on-site storage space. For further information please call at 212.924.2178, visit our website at www.berrycampbell.com, or email at info@berrycampbell.com.

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