Vincent Fecteau at Matthew Marks

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incent Fecteau’s recent resin-clay sculptures have leapt onto the wall. This show juxtaposed them with low-relief collages that include photographic content. The clay works (all 2014), with their openings and bulges, create a unique formal vocabulary. They are hand-painted in matte, camouflage-like colors with occasional accents of, for example, murky brown.

These sculptures are not slick, highly finished forms. Nor are they expressionistic, since they don’t reflect the artist’s state of mind or his hand. They are also not constructivist, since they don’t play with geometric or building forms. Though abstract, they do seem to relate to forms found in the world, or at least to the negative imprints of such forms. For example, they suggest the underbodies of cars and the plastic packing that surrounds new electronic devices.

One tiny untitled collage was particularly suggestive, with its photograph of a bed emerging from a flat background. In the center of the work, a small black-plastic wedge, shaped like a pyramid, echoes the form created by the image of the bedsheets being drawn back in a tight triangle. Finding such resonances was one of the beauties of contemplating these collages and sculptures. With the latter placed on the wall, we were left to imagine each missing side.

A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 119.