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.