Excerpt from Larry Zox: At the Edge
By Patricia L. Lewy, Ph.D.
Larry 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.” 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....
