Vincent Fecteau

What visitor to Vincent Fecteau’s exhibition in Kunsthalle Basel’s skylit hall isn’t already acquainted with works of modernist sculpture that are anxious to create, via abstraction and even sheer volume, relevant forms that simultaneously engage with their sites and engross their audiences? Connoisseurs of Hans Arp or Henry Moore, for instance, soon find themselves at home with Fecteau’s work—and yet the artist is after something very different from what Arp or Moore pursued. To start with, his materials—hard foam, wood, papier-mâché, and acrylic—run contrary to those of his predecessors. From these he creates, for example, Ohne Titel (Untitled), 2012. This work, like the other sculptures in the exhibition, is presented on a pedestal, in keeping with tradition. It features a shapely, amorphous figure whose dark surfaces in contoured arcs and arches end with abrupt breaks and openings accentuated in blue. Or take another untitled work, from 2002, a ten-inch-high dome made of plaster with seashell trimming, looking as if it were an architectonic study from the hand of Rudolf Steiner.

Among the advantages of this equanimously beautiful exhibition is that it juxtaposes ten sculptures from the last twelve years, all presented on pedestals, with Fecteau’s most recent series, all untitled pieces from this year. The fifteen works—black boxes of various shapes but approximately the same size—reveal collages within, stages on which stories are sketched through newspaper clippings that speak to Fecteau’s penchant for interior spaces and architecture. Indeed, seen as architectural constructions, his modernist sculptures in the center of the Kunsthalle reclaim contemporaneity anew.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.