Sharpening her wit

Whether by happy accident or scrupulous scheduling, Lecia Dole-Recio’s collage paintings have landed right where they belong at the Museum of Contemporary Art: sandwiched between the robust Robert Rauschenberg “Combines” show and a more pensive spread of Eva Hesse drawings. The spot works for Dole-Recio, as it plays up affinities between the young L.A. artist and two well-established figures. It also works for MOCA visitors, offering a pleasant snack between hearty, heady feasts.

Eight pieces hang in the Focus series exhibition organized by Brooke Hodge, a few previously shown and the rest making their first appearance here. All are the lively outcome of accretive and subtractive acts using gouache, graphite, glue, tape, paper, vellum and cardboard. Dole-Recio’s favored tool is the X-Acto knife. She carves into her paper ground, extracting shapes and leaving negative outlines made shiny by transparent tape. She also builds up the density of the ground by adhering pieces of paper cut in strips or other shapes.

There is something of the sculptural in this process, and also the architectural in Dole-Recio’s evocation of dimensional structures to be entered (at least visually) and explored. Ornament and decoration come into play as well -- play being the operative term. Dole-Recio’s work straddles the elegance of fine mosaic inlay and the irreverence of tossed confetti. It marries intelligent design with a crafty sense of humor.

The show’s four largest pieces measure 5 to 10 feet per side and are proportionally more involved and interesting than the small works. A circle within a square serves as a basic modular unit in one recent work; thickly delineated grids appear in most of the rest. The flat patterns repeat in sections, then tilt away from the surface plane to suggest recession, a warped faceting or the partial formation of cubes. Units detach from the rest to float as free agents. Shapes rhyme, then fall into syncopation. Dimensionality is flaunted, thwarted, interrupted, suppressed.

Dole-Recio enacts a vibrant fluidity in these large works on paper. She respects the grid’s crisp logic but not as an absolute, more as a foil to the organic and spontaneous. In Post-Minimalist fashion, she tests the grid, stretches it, dissolves it. Like Hesse, she treats it more as malleable raw material than essential scaffold.

The surface too is up for grabs -- sliced into, taped over, painted on, layered with shapes in cut colored paper, translucent vellum and cardboard. All of this manipulation of space sets the surface in motion, expanding upon its conventional single, fixed plane. There is also vacillation between abstract decorative order (think textile design) and a concrete real-world rawness (corrugated cardboard). That rawness carries over from the neighboring “Combines” of Rauschenberg.

Paint drips and pools in passages of luscious plum, mauve, rust and violet or persimmon, gray and ocher, olive, safflower and dusty rose. Like graphic mortar, it helps bind the geometric shapes into a continuous, vigorous whole.

Scale proves wonderfully slippery. Dole-Recio’s forms hint of structures and patterns found not just in other art (she counts Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian among her influences) but in the built and natural landscape. The warped, shifting planes bring to mind scientific diagrams of the dimensionality of space itself. Zooming in from that macrocosmic view, the blocky patterns with their varied densities resemble aerial images of urban areas. Coming in closer, the forms suggest the replicating patterns of the hive. Closer still, they evoke clusters of cells, microcosmic networks as hidden to the naked eye as those on the macrocosmic level.

Dole-Recio’s small works are static and slight in comparison, mere cut-and-paste sketches. The large pieces, though, tap into a formidable energy and sense of emergent growth not unlike what fuels the meandering sculptures of Sarah Sze and the amped-up drawings of Julie Mehretu. Dole-Recio invites order to mix with the indeterminate, the rigid grid to consort with the fluid weave and pattern to reconcile with deviation. The friction she’s generated spills vibrantly across the page, beautiful wallpaper caught in a force field.

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MOCA Focus: Lecia Dole-Recio

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to midnight Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Ends: Oct. 23

Price: $5 to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org