Gallery 16 is pleased to present its seventh solo exhibition with San Francisco artist Alex Zecca. There will be an opening reception for the artist on Friday, September 6, from 6 to 9pm.
The action of drawing a straight line from edge to edge is completely fulfilling, meditative, and focusing. For me, this wonderfully simple mark, has it all. - AZ
The central focus of Zecca’s practice continues to be about process and color mixing. Zecca’s system is a specific and exacting methodology as is his exercise in focus and precision. His hand-drawn works marry a sense of the scientific with the art of craft, the conceptual with the handmade.
The new pieces expand on the artist’s obsessive and precise technique but present fresh variations on his time-intensive practice of accumulating thousands of colored, ruled lines. The vibrant abstractions, each made of the literal recording of innumerable, painstakingly rendered marks, are made with only a pen and a straight edge. These cumulative sequences of inked lines on paper are then cut into strips, reconfigured, and mounted on plywood panels. The end results are bigger areas of saturated color and bolder, more active paintings.
Art critic Kenneth Baker wrote, “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. 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.”
Zecca attended California College of the Arts and studied in Italy before receiving his MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Zecca’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions in San Francisco, CA and has been curated alongside other masters of pattern including Yayoi Kusama and Ross Bleckner in the Crocker Art Museum’s exhibition Approaching Infinity: The Richard Green Collection of Meticulous Abstraction.
