In 1972, David Novros painted a fresco on the wall of the Museum of Modern Art. When the exhibition closed, the museum destroyed it.
The work had been conceived in the tradition of mural painting—inseparable from the architecture that held it. Yet the conditions of contemporary exhibition practice offered no permanence. Walls change with every installation, galleries require movable objects, and paintings must travel between collectors, museums, and storage.
Faced with this contradiction, Novros developed what he called portable murals: paintings composed of multiple panels that extend laterally across the wall. The works retain the spatial ambition of fresco while remaining objects that can be dismantled, transported, and reinstalled elsewhere. What appears at first to be a formal device—modular geometry arranged across a surface—emerges instead as a structural solution to a practical problem: how to make mural-scale painting possible within a system that does not permit murals.
Long before modern painting became a portable object, color was used to organize the experience of space. Byzantine mosaics structured entire interiors through fields of gold and saturated pigment. Islamic tile patterns established rhythm across architectural surfaces through repeated chromatic intervals. Renaissance fresco cycles integrated painting directly into walls, where color guided the viewer’s movement through chapels and corridors. In each case, color was not decoration applied to architecture—it was one of the primary means by which architecture itself was perceived.
Seen from this longer perspective, Novros’s work reads less as a relic of minimalism than as the continuation of a much older ambition: to use color as a way of shaping space.
The paintings currently on view at Paula Cooper Gallery, completed between 2024 and 2025, continue this investigation. Composed of adjoining panels set against deep grounds of red, ochre, violet, and black, the works stretch laterally across the wall, their color relationships emerging gradually from one section to the next. What initially appears as a sequence of geometric forms slowly resolves into a more complex spatial rhythm. As the eye moves across the composition, each panel establishes a chromatic interval with the next, producing a sense of movement that unfolds horizontally rather than concentrating around a single focal point.
Within these arrangements, right-angled panels align and slide past one another, producing moments of compression and release along the surface of the wall. The resulting depth is not illusionistic. It emerges from the physical relationships between panel edges and the intervals of color they create. Space is constructed rather than depicted—closer to the logic of fresco or mosaic than to the pictorial depth of easel painting.
The scale of the works reinforces this architectural effect. Installed across wide expanses of wall, the paintings resist the self-contained boundaries typical of modernist canvases. Instead, they behave more like segments of larger spatial systems, establishing rhythms that extend beyond the edges of any single panel. Color becomes the primary structural element through which the viewer’s perception of the wall—and the surrounding room—is organized.
An accompanying group of watercolors explores similar chromatic relationships on a smaller scale, functioning less as preparatory studies than as parallel investigations into how color establishes rhythm and interval.
More than sixty years after his first encounters with European fresco cycles and Byzantine mosaics, Novros continues to pursue a question that remains unresolved within contemporary painting: how a medium traditionally confined to portable objects might still operate at the scale and ambition of architecture.
