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Like Keith Haring, Barry McGee, and Shepard Fairey, Brooklyn-based Greg Lamarche was a street artist in the 1980s before being shown by commercial galleries. Lamarche’s first solo exhibition in Canada, “Cut to the Chase,” is a mini-retrospective of text-based and hard-edged abstract collages from the last five years.

Despite their small size, Lamarche’s collages exude all the energy of modern-day graffiti. However, he culls his paper materials exclusively from 1950s and ‘60s magazines. The prismatic patterns, and retro color palette — mustard, teal, olive, and orange — bring to mind the textiles of the Finnish design firm Marimekko, as well as paintings by Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Bridget Riley. This is evident in works like the Diamond Force Fields, 2010, where bright arrays of diamond shapes jostle against each other across the paper’s surface. In the “O Drops” series, 2009-10, the artist arranges vertical rows of solid-colored stripes of varying lengths from the top of the sheet. Each row ends with an “o,” suggesting the runny drips of paint in aerosol-can graffiti.

The “Remnants” and “Broken Columns” series, both 2010, point to interesting future possibilities. In the former, the artist painstakingly arranges castoffs from other collages into single, ornate words. In the latter, strips of paper are arranged in ribbon-like shapes that could be miniature Sol Lewitt wall drawings.