At a time and in a place where insanely gigantic seems to be the default scale, Saul Fletcher’s quietly stirring show of some two dozen small photographs at Anton Kern acted as a sneakily bracing disruption of the status quo. The most tangible upshot of Chelsea’s current architectural hypertrophy—nothing more, really, than a blunt spatialization of the distended market that gives rise to it—is that even the most self-confident work often seems to strain under the obligation to live up to the sheer cubic feet devoted to it, lending a vague sheen of flop sweat to even good ideas and persuasive objects. Fletcher, a self-taught photographer who picked up a camera while working on the docks in North Lincolnshire, UK, has shown with Kern for more than a decade and a half, essentially his entire career, and evinced no signs of such stress. As he has with a remarkable consistency across the years, here he once again managed to coax his particular sort of melancholic energy from his characteristically reticent artifacts: frontal, plainspoken images both very small (many were roughly 5 x 7") and pictorially modest (each focuses on the artist’s studio wall, which serves alternately as a surface for scrappy little constructions and casual inscriptions, and as a backdrop for various actions).

These new works were made in Berlin, where Fletcher moved not long ago with his family, and they represent one of the main strands of the artist’s practice, which in recent years has alternated between photos like these, made in his generatively restricted studio setting, and a kind of charged plein-air documentation. Fletcher’s relationship with his wall is a psychologically complex one, and after a while, viewers might well start to feel as if the surface possesses a kind of agency, not just serving the project but in some sense acting in it. Fletcher thus becomes a kind of monitor, scanning his wall for signs of activity, aiming to capture instances of substitution that seem to happen almost beyond his hand, as one thing after another appears between him and the marked-up, worked-over partition. The transient paraphernalia that finds its way there appears and disappears with such absorbing nonchalance—waste wood arranged into a spindly cross; a simple chair; a poor spiderweb made from assorted sticks, woven from string, and stuck to the blotched surface of the wall with duct tape—that they can come to seem more like naturally occurring trouvaille than like carefully schemed-out interpolations. These lucky finds—things and persons apparently passing before a kind of camera trap that freezes them in their natural habitat—only seem to grow in significance when set against the implacability of the wall face, a surface whose material history and psychic weather Fletcher knows intimately. From one to another, the tiny images unfold into a weirdly free-form seriality, and the concentrated mindfulness required to identify not just the state of the objects but also the literal and figurative condition of the wall starts to feel like an act of devotion.

The photographs on view (all 2013) included works in both black-and-white and color, and if the former receive a compellingly despondent tang from their monochrome ambience, the C-prints demonstrate Fletcher’s flair as a colorist. There are a few moments of familiar pathos in the color photos—the small bird skeleton of Untitled #269 (Pigeon), for example, suggests the artist’s taste for the gothic—but what the shorter distances and tighter cropping emphasize most is the delicacy of the artist’s hand. In Untitled #264 (8 Nests), for instance, Fletcher fancies up his wall, garlanding splotches of color with rough bacchanalian wreaths, while in Untitled #271 (Home), the surface is the site for a humbly collaged town plan of sorts, with a jumble of roads and quickly sketched houses, showing a way of return—an artist’s map and his territory, coextensive.

—Jeffrey Kastner