Lecia Dole-Recio

Born 1971 in San Francisco

Lecia Dole-Recio’s works revel in an identity crisis. They are not quite paintings and not quite collages. They remain untitled, appended only by an indexical list in a clipped, short form of the materials and motifs that comprise them. These “painted constructions”—assembled from cut paper, cardboard, paint, and tape—boldly defy being classified.

Dole-Recio sets rules related to how she makes her work, painting or making collages in tight, allover compositions based on a single motif—circles, stripes, triangles. She then further complicates the work by removing sections and replacing holes with cut shapes that don’t quite fit, frequently creating a picture plane that plays with the relationship between foreground and background. 

Dole-Recio’s process exists on a continuum that she likens to spolia, the building technique, dating to Roman antiquity, of incorporating used bricks or stone reliefs into new structures. The residues of her working method, from the paper cutouts amassed in organized piles to the scuffed and paint-splattered paper lining the floor of her studio, are given equal value and saved to be reinserted into future works. Dole-Recio’s painted constructions sit easily, agreeably, in precarious space.