In the early 70s Cohen’s ‘rules for painting’ underwent an important development. Intent on finding solutions to the painterly challenges that had preoccupied him throughout his career - questions of colour relationships and the partitioning of space on the canvas surface, Cohen sought to codify his approach.

Identifying three governing modes for partitioning space, he categorised these modes into maplike works determined by differing rules for growth, with each group adhering to an alternate purpose and strategy: Contour Maps, Territorial Maps, and Mazes.

Untitled (i23-3479) is an example of a Territorial Map. Generated on a mini computer, plotted with the Calcomp plotter on pin fed computer paper, and then partially filled in with coloured inks, it consists of adjoining irregular shaped cells. The names of colours, including ‘lemon’, ‘violet’ and ‘blue’ have been stencilled atop of these individual areas.

Cohen’s purpose with the Territorial Maps was to build a ‘system of interlocked closed forms’, where ‘no single form dominates the whole’, but instead each form becomes the ‘figure’ when looked at, and the ‘ground’ when a different form is being looked at.’ Colour was controlled and restricted so that, of the small number of colours allocated to the form, no two adjacent forms had the same colour, but every colour is in edge contact with every other colour somewhere in the painting.

Cohen enlarged several of his territorial maps into large scale paintings, where he replicated the computational output by hand on canvas. An example of this is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, following the inclusion of a similar work, Labelled Painting - Red, Lemon, Dark Blue, Violet, Umber (1970) in the 1972 LACMA exhibition, Three Behaviors for the Partitioning of Space.