Lecia Dole-Recio

Few lines align with the edges of the compositions in Lecia Dole-Recio’s new works. Nearly five years after her busy cut-and-paste collages of vellum, paper, and gouache were presented in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, this exhibition, the artist’s first New York solo show, presents eight pieces that maintain an equivalent sense of dynamism despite having far more subdued surfaces. In Untitled (prpl.rd.orng.lnn.) (all works 2008), large blocks of bright red, rendered in acrylic, angle across the linen canvas, their edges picked out with contrasting strokes in orange; in Untitled (blk.lns.bl.lnn.), broad swaths of azure, cut diagonally by slashes of black, float against a green background like linens out to dry. Dole-Recio now often works with stencils, a fact readily apparent in Untitled (red.cppr.lnn.), in which long, thin rectangles in copper, gray, purple, and white overlap atop haphazardly applied pinks that range from cherry blossom to near crimson. These forms appear to be enlarged versions of the rectangular cutouts in several small works on paper, which, with their off-kilter circles and rectangles sliced into or composed of cardboard and then painted, serve as links to the works presented at the Whitney. But if those earlier collages fetishized each of the artist’s choices, and their cuts perhaps symbolized the precedents she was excising from the history of formalist modernism, a glorious new canvas like Untitled (gld.crvs.lnn.) gives evidence of the ways in which Dole-Recio, now more confident, deploys her chosen vocabulary. An explosion of stenciled curves in gray, dark green, black, and safety-alert orange wells up from the bottom of the painting like fireworks or a peacock’s plumage and is loosely coordinated with similar semicircles visible beneath a golden ground. In this work, as throughout the show, order and disorder are held in captivating balance.

A concurrent exhibition of Lecia Dole-Recio’s work, on view until February 7, is being held in Los Angeles at Richard Telles Fine Art.