By Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
Alex Zecca has long worked with such methodical consistency that I go
to each new exhibition of his expecting to see more of the same. But he
has not yet failed to surprise.
Zecca's show at Gallery 16 plays fresh variations on his familiar
practice of accumulating ruled, colored lines - into the thousands per
piece - so that their crossing at angles generates inevitable but
undesigned optical marvels.
You move around certain of Zecca's new works on paper expecting
flickers of iridescence, so keenly do they recall the powdery luminosity
of a butterfly wing or exotic plumage. But Zecca's patterns reassert
their flatness from every viewing angle.
New examples in enamel on prepared linen lend additional body to the
lines' hues, deepening and extending their optical effects. These pieces
amplify familiar, though still inadvertent, echoes of American Indian
textiles and even, in "Line Painting 7" (2012), of the poured color
fields of Morris Louis (1912-1962).
You cannot look at many of Zecca's drawings without wondering what
he does with those that inevitably go awry, either through aesthetic
failure or by an accident such as a spill or tear. In a new series of
wall-mounted collages, we may have the answer.
These pieces display more overt variety than Zecca's intact works on
paper or canvas. But they all consist of wedges of ink-striated paper
plainly suggesting slices of drawings spoiled, abandoned or no longer
loved.
Looking like Art Deco explosions, Futurist heraldry or the
brainstorms of a mad jewelry designer, the wall collages shatter the
abstraction of Zecca's familiar work, letting in humor and new
associations and compositional flair.
