Lecia Dole-Recio
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA
In 1938 the artist, designer and architect Max Bill created his Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme, which he described as consisting of ‘the continuous development of an equilateral triangle to a regular octagon’. Typical of his work, Bill’s variations began with a set graphic rule and proceeded through a premeditated assortment of exercises on that theme. The results were often a resonant, colourful series of imperceptibly similar drawn movements. Yet Bill’s mechanized methods also harboured an alarming implication, predicting a moment of pre-programmed fine art devoid of the artist’s hand and conscious of its own objecthood. Manifest in the ensuing decades, that revelation had both its pinnacle and decline, so that now the spoils of prefabrication are a foil for many artists. Owing something to Bill’s penchant for systematic mutation, and remaining one of Los Angeles’ finest purveyors of an aesthetic based in a keen sense for the tactile, Lecia Dole-Recio has continually countered the programmed future that Bill’s art foresaw.
For her first solo museum exhibition Dole-Recio exhibited a series of new works alongside two pieces dating from 2004. The short period represented illustrated the artist’s confident evolution as she pressed her signature style of manually manipulated patterns and gestural architectonics in new directions. The larger of the two works from 2004, Untitled, a slightly off-square, five-foot concoction of vellum, gouache, graphite, tape and glue, provided a fair introduction to the artist’s creations. Pinned to the wall without any supplemental support, the surface is built, but not in the manner of incessantly applied paint. Rather, Dole-Recio constructs. She cuts up her surfaces and applies out-takes from other studio work, creating a flat but multi-layered field. With a palette made up of subtle shifts of orange, yellow, pink and green pastels, the overall order of the work is composed of repeating motifs. A circle in a square, or squares and circles on their own, all echo in near-duplication as they fall and rise, slanting across a white ground like temple steps devoid of infrastructure.
The move from smaller commercial gallery walls to this institutional setting allowed Dole-Recio to expand the scale of her works slightly while leaving room to breathe. Set in a room between Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’ (1954–64) and an exhibition of Eva Hesse’s drawings, Dole-Recio’s presentation communicated a confidence in experimenting with a surface tension partially indebted to these antecedents. Her large ‘black’ painting Untitled (2006) – her past works were typically composed on a white ground – was an entrancing example. Across a field of purples and pinks swirling in the background like clouded galaxies, geometric configurations were built up, climaxing in the middle of the composition and unwinding themselves as they trailed off towards the corners. Blocks of homogeneously coloured, multipartite rhomboids formed, broke apart and reformed across the surface as if they were geometric organisms undergoing mimetic reproduction. Even the incidental – such as a dime-sized drop of paint carrying a vivid conglomeration of multiple colours – was something to be savoured. Eschewing the dark matter on which this activity was built,
Dole-Recio’s dilapidated sense of construction suggests a deep space, as if a vision of intergalactic architecture had revealed itself to the artist, making the viewer privy to a small slice of its infinity.
Dwarfed by her adjacent larger works were three of Dole-Recio’s intimate studies of line and colour. One, Untitled (2005), was a series of diagonal, neutral-coloured lines occupying the entire field in a series of subtle shifts, as if each line was a deliberately ill-fitting tile. These studies clarified the artist’s relation to a history of surface-oriented painters, from Piet Mondrian to Robert Ryman to Richard Tuttle, yet associations with these necessarily peerless figures are testament to Dole-Recio’s exceptionally singular aesthetic.
Dole-Recio’s paintings evade attempts at categorization. Rather, they are compositions, in both a musical and architectural sense. They are constructed of various themes, movements and spaces. Her systematically ordered patterns commingle with organic moments of intuition, the visual equivalents of surface noise and back-ground drones that coalesce into a consonant configuration. With an entirely abstract sense of illusory space, Dole-Recio’s translucent world is a constant scrimmage between the wall and the entangled web of painted, cut and replaced materials teeming within the object affixed to it. Beyond their own classification, and filled with Dole-Recio’s finest graphic instincts and most delicate gestural discretions, these images feel unbound by stylistic restraint while hinting at as yet unexplored terrain on the otherwise well-trodden ground of geometric abstraction.
Chris Balaschak
