March 21, 2004
Lecia Dole-Recio essay from 2004 Whitney Biennial catalog
The lack of posts stems from the fact that I'm still recovering from last week. In the absence of anything new, here's the text I wrote on Los Angeles artist Lecia Dole-Recio for the 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibition catalogue. I'll post a few here and there as fillers until I'm back on my feet and posting reviews and commentary again. Dole-Recio's art is my favorite discovery of the exhibition. Her works are on the second floor, paired with a large sculpture by Eric Wesley. Here's the text:
Lecia Dole-Recio creates variously scaled artworks that can simultaneously be considered paintings, drawings, collages, or wall-based sculptures. Using a wide array of materials including cardboard, paper, tape, a knife, graphite, and glue in addition to paint, her hybrid works employ a language of handmade geometric abstraction to explore material, surface, the picture plane, and color.
Dole-Recio’s use of a knife is key. She begins by taping or pasting together several layers of cardboard, butcher or watercolor paper, or vellum, painting or drawing over the top layer. Then she hand-carves geometric holes into the surface, revealing the various strata and giving her work an optical depth. The cutout circles, squares, and rhomboids--slightly smaller than the holes they came from--are then imperfectly pasted back into the composition and painted over. Many rows of these incisions form loose grids across the surface of Dole-Recio’s artworks.
A vertically oriented untitled work from 2001 has as its base a piece of vellum largely painted dark gray in thin vertical gouache strokes. It is affixed to the wall from its top corners, and the bottom half of the work appears to have fallen away, leaving a jagged edge. Cutout circles, similar to ones fitted into the square “windows” cut out of the vellum at the middle of the composition, appear to have escaped the surface, held aloft just below the work’s main body by transparent packing tape. The artwork appears to be frozen mid-transformation, its skin flaking off and falling to the floor. More recent works complicate Dole-Recio’s process by allowing several patterns or graphic systems to interact in different ways across the composition.
Dole-Recio’s labor-intensive process bridges traditional categories of art making. A sculptural cutout that makes a shadow by pushing away from the surface of one artwork may simply be a drawn or painted representation of a shadow on the next. This element of surprise encourages the viewer to consider each work more fully, examining the blurred line between her forms and the spaces that surround them. Dole-Recio’s visual gamesmanship merges material and process to ensure that her abstract works are not always what they seem.