The Brooklyn Rail

When I first received the press release for Faktura / Tektonika at Sean Kelly, my anticipation was genuine. I was not expecting an art historical treatise, or a museum show but rather a contemporary view—an exhibition that would thoughtfully engage with these pivotal significant concepts in the present moment. My unfamiliarity with many of the artists listed and the title of the exhibition suggested a thoughtful engagement with these two of the most pivotal and critical concepts of modernism, whose application shaped the discourses of Cubism and Constructivism and, by extension, the trajectory of abstract art.

I should have known I would be disappointed, given in the press release the curator’s definition of these terms; for instance, faktura is not simply about “material properties” nor does tektonika reference a work’s generic spatial presence. Though these definitions are highly accessible, this flattening of their meanings is a significant misreading, as the conflation ignores the historical specificity and theoretical rigor these terms demand. Forged in the crucible of avant-garde theory, this nomenclature expressed the modern artists’ insistence on making the viewer aware of the inherent properties of materials and the visible evidence of the process by which the work was made. For instance, faktura is the antithesis of illusionism; it is the truth of the object, laid bare—its concreteness. Tektonika, meanwhile, concerns the structural logic of the work—the way materials are organized to create a unified, dynamic whole. It is the architecture of the artwork, the expressive arrangement that reveals both function and construction, echoing the underlying modernist belief in art as purposeful, rational, and materially honest in its assembly.

In the context of contemporary art, these terms found their last critical resonance in the work of Post-Minimalists—Barry Le Va, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and their cohort. Their practices were rooted in the phenomenological nature of the artwork, foregrounding process, duration, and the viewer’s embodied experience. Here, faktura was not just surface, but the index of action and time; tektonika was not just structure, but the logic of assembly as an event. Le Va’s “scatter pieces:” the residue of action, the trace of process, the material’s own agency—this is faktura in its most radical form. Matta-Clark’s building cuts: the organization of space, the exposure of structure, the choreography of void and mass—tektonika as lived experience. The entropic logic of Smithson’s mirror and broken glass works unfold in time and space. Then there are Winsor and Serra, who emphasized the role of weight, gravity, and the irreducible fact of their works’ material presence.

As hard as I looked and analyzed, I could not find a single work in this show that truly addressed these terms; though a few of the artists played stylistic lip service to them by making paintings using non-traditional media, most of these were in a conventional format. Jose Dávila’s sculpture Fundamental Concern (2022) consisting of a precarious stacking of diverse materials held in place by ratcheted straps comes closest to the spirit of the title. This is not a trivial complaint, for exhibitions like this run the risk of turning powerful, historically charged concepts into empty buzzwords, severed from the radical ambitions they once animated. To invoke faktura and tektonika as curator Robert Spring does is to strip the language of its forceful history and reduce the words to mere memes. As such, the critical perspective promised by the show’s title was undermined by the curator’s failure to grasp the depth and specificity of faktura and tektonika, and their demand for a critical engagement with process, structure, and phenomenology. To do less is to miss the point of invoking them entirely.

Consequently, this exhibition only amounts to a survey of mainly mid-career painters and a handful of sculptors working in diverse styles, media, and materials, showing little evidence of the deep, process-based, and structurally innovative practices that a critical engagement with faktura and tektonika represents. This curatorial framing does a disservice to the artists included, placing them in a critical context that obscures, rather than clarifies, their actual concerns and achievements. Rather than illuminating the potential of these concepts, the exhibition ultimately bowdlerizes them, losing an opportunity to engage with the true critical and historical significance of faktura and tektonika and the aesthetic ambitions they might represent in the present moment.