Decorah (Single Gemini Series) 1968

Larry Zox made this color field painting, Decorah, and it’s got that awesome hard-edge thing going on, with shapes bumping up against each other, all precise and neat. The colors are so flat and evenly applied, almost like they’ve been sprayed on. It's an illusion though, you know? I can see traces of the brushstrokes, little imperfections, that tell me Zox did this by hand. There's this yellow that just pops right out at you, and it’s got me thinking about how the different colors play together. Like, how that thin band of white defines the other colors around the edge of the canvas, and makes the yellow really sing. Zox was part of a whole crew of artists playing with color and form in the '60s and '70s, like Kenneth Noland or Frank Stella, but he’s got his own thing, for sure. For me, art is about opening up possibilities, not closing them down, and this painting does just that.