Mis-Shapes: Lecia Dole-Recio

Commonwealth and Council presents Mis-Shapes, Lecia Dole-Recio’s second presentation with the gallery.

Dole-Recio’s constructions are visual conundrums that delight in a material experimentation evidenced by their variety of media, including cardboard, dirt, vellum, gouache, and homemade natural dyes. Self-exposure motivates every part of their evolvement, from the single motifs with which the artist begins her process (paper circles, triangles, and other shapes excised by X-acto knife) to the gradual layering of scraps, drips, smears, and splatters accumulated on the studio floor. Defying easy categorization, Dole-Recio’s painting-collages find foothold where language fails experience, laying themselves bare only to corporeal relation.

For Mis-Shapes, Dole-Recio continues her familiar queering of shape (as something that both orders and obscures, contains and reveals) through the motif of the disrupted grid. Screens, nets, and lattices find themselves interlaced with curved triangles and half-circles, their spray painted outlines overlaid with mismatched stencils. Orthogonal lines invite the eye to follow their rapid acceleration and sudden halts across the pictorial surface, exposing a playful banter between positive and negative space, background and foreground, protrusion and recession. In contrast to this dramatic shifting of pictorial depth, the works maintain material levity as the artist carves divergent shapes directly into the paper in order to minimize their layers.

Time, in turn, casts its shadow through the artifacts of the artistic process. In Untitled (seven overlapping curve grids), shoe prints lie stamped in a mixture of cochineal and lemon juice among other indexical markings, while a curved form in Untitled (gold and grey overlapping circle grids) finds its sprayed cast left behind in Untitled (grey triangles, five grids, and blue spray curve). Cut-outs, discards, and outlines act as intuitive mappings of the choices, possibilities, and U-turns made at every stage of self-construction, fragmentations of dimension that compound and echo between works across the gallery. Dole-Recio’s use of natural pigments continues this welcoming of the outside world into the field of the paintings, with elemental washes in crimson, salmon pink, and inky purple created using foraged oak gall, walnut, and cochineal. What results are fluid compositions which revel in a re-organization of space, surface, and touch, encouraging the viewer’s close observation as they move around the works.