Vincent Fecteau
14 Sep - 27 Oct 2012
VINCENT FECTEAU
14 September – 27 October 2012
With this we proudly announce the second solo show of Vincent Fecteau at Galerie Buchholz, the first exhibition of the artist in Berlin.
Vincent Fecteau (*1969, lives in San Francisco) has been working since the mid-1990’s on sculptures that because of their spatial appearance, of their materials (cardboard, Kapa board, found objects), of their dimensions, and not least of Vincent Fecteau’s preferred presentation mode which often employed display tables, vaguely recall enigmatic architectural models.
Since the beginning of the 2000’s Vincent Fecteau has been working almost exclusively in papier-mâché. The sculptures have departed more and more from any definable spatial relationship and turned into complicated, internally entangled entities. In recent years Vincent Fecteau had gone over to presenting his sculptures also on pedestals, in this way distancing them even more from the ambivalent character of models, but without completely abandoning a remote architectural aspect. In 2010 Fecteau showed a cycle of sculptures which he mounted with a special hanging device on the walls of the exhibition space so that front and back, top and bottom became completely reversible. The sculptures were even re-hung during the period of exhibition and shown from their different sides.
Vincent Fecteau has so far always worked on a group of sculptures at the same time over a rather long period. He develops the final form through handling the material and only rarely and in small details does he work from preconceived ideas or sketches. In the past the creative process was determined by a core form determined by the material, for example an inflatable beach ball, or boxes to which he then applied layers of papier-mâché. These first layers were removed, cut up, re-assembled and in this way became the formal basis for numerous further formal modifications, until he arrived at the final shape of the sculpture. The coloring of the sculptures too goes through many different stages. In this it is to be noted that Vincent Fecteau seems to color his sculptures less artistically, but rather applies paint on them in the way a housepainter treats walls or rooms. Mostly with relatively blunt, muted emulsion paint. Any spatial effects, shading, or even permitted stains or dirt seem to derive from the repertoire of a painter for stage designs.
For the seven new sculptures in this exhibition Vincent Fecteau uses for the first time new material or new base material that significantly affect the spatiality and form of his sculptures. Three sculptures that were previously shown in this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York are extended and re-worked casts of gypsum cement. Starting with forms out of clay from which molds were made, these casts were produced and then re-assembled and expanded by the artist with a molding compound and coated with layers of color. The four larger scale sculptures being exhibited here for the first time, Vincent Fecteau’s biggest sculptures to date, are once again made out of papier-mâché but this time built around a core of insulating foam as their base material. The extended possibility for modeling that this new base material offers seem to make the convoluted forms even more complicated.
14 September – 27 October 2012
With this we proudly announce the second solo show of Vincent Fecteau at Galerie Buchholz, the first exhibition of the artist in Berlin.
Vincent Fecteau (*1969, lives in San Francisco) has been working since the mid-1990’s on sculptures that because of their spatial appearance, of their materials (cardboard, Kapa board, found objects), of their dimensions, and not least of Vincent Fecteau’s preferred presentation mode which often employed display tables, vaguely recall enigmatic architectural models.
Since the beginning of the 2000’s Vincent Fecteau has been working almost exclusively in papier-mâché. The sculptures have departed more and more from any definable spatial relationship and turned into complicated, internally entangled entities. In recent years Vincent Fecteau had gone over to presenting his sculptures also on pedestals, in this way distancing them even more from the ambivalent character of models, but without completely abandoning a remote architectural aspect. In 2010 Fecteau showed a cycle of sculptures which he mounted with a special hanging device on the walls of the exhibition space so that front and back, top and bottom became completely reversible. The sculptures were even re-hung during the period of exhibition and shown from their different sides.
Vincent Fecteau has so far always worked on a group of sculptures at the same time over a rather long period. He develops the final form through handling the material and only rarely and in small details does he work from preconceived ideas or sketches. In the past the creative process was determined by a core form determined by the material, for example an inflatable beach ball, or boxes to which he then applied layers of papier-mâché. These first layers were removed, cut up, re-assembled and in this way became the formal basis for numerous further formal modifications, until he arrived at the final shape of the sculpture. The coloring of the sculptures too goes through many different stages. In this it is to be noted that Vincent Fecteau seems to color his sculptures less artistically, but rather applies paint on them in the way a housepainter treats walls or rooms. Mostly with relatively blunt, muted emulsion paint. Any spatial effects, shading, or even permitted stains or dirt seem to derive from the repertoire of a painter for stage designs.
For the seven new sculptures in this exhibition Vincent Fecteau uses for the first time new material or new base material that significantly affect the spatiality and form of his sculptures. Three sculptures that were previously shown in this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York are extended and re-worked casts of gypsum cement. Starting with forms out of clay from which molds were made, these casts were produced and then re-assembled and expanded by the artist with a molding compound and coated with layers of color. The four larger scale sculptures being exhibited here for the first time, Vincent Fecteau’s biggest sculptures to date, are once again made out of papier-mâché but this time built around a core of insulating foam as their base material. The extended possibility for modeling that this new base material offers seem to make the convoluted forms even more complicated.