Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen

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The muscle car was - if by name alone - intended to resemble a body. Exuded the "muscle" it contained, sleek and rippling with. The image seeped into culture and the fast cars took on different appearances, insectoid, technical. But those muscled images remain latent, in the cultural ether, and Fecteau seems to pluck and rearrange some subconscious forms of these chopped and reassembled, looking like something you vaguely recall but can't place. Like a google algorithm trying to invent a car part, like a human recalling some vague sexual attachment to a physical objet before understanding what a body was for.

“Magic Ben Big Boy” at Matthew Marks

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You can see what was already in the later work then, that endless turning from inside to outside, what is open and what is hidden. While ever more skeletally baroque now, the similar rotations then, into shyness then. A portal opens, a cork plugs, things are sealed, places buried. What happens inside these "Shirley Temple Rooms" is what's at stake, but the exhibition's "Ben" is a Michael Jackson song about a boy who love his rat, and the "Big Boy" is adult sized sexual assault trauma doll, and the "Magic" is some old crone with a box of roses, cats wideyed at their prey, Magic Ben the big boy, and our eyes the size of eggs, I'm sure you can put the story together.

Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi

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Fecteau's like architectural navels, the "complicated pockets" like ears or industrial labia. They resemble, brandish resemblance, which morph in sinuous exterior/interior unsecured - aortic openings hint interior chambers, others skeletal - they twist in on themselves like an ouroboric muscle car. Like cutting open your abdomen to reveal a cathedral. These turns are important, they mirror our body's soft points, the vulnerable pink cusps. Notice your body shifting from exterior to interior, your lips, eyes, anus, ears, urethral opening, these twilight moments rolling into. Look at Fecteau's early work, even the architectural models or shoe boxes always explicitly turning inside before falling back into exterior, undulating, like Bird in Space that can be phallus or colon, the confusion of interior exterior is constant, they are rotatable, spin, find yourself wandering their curvature inwards to find yourself outwards again, inside-out and proleptic.


See too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova