Surface tension
Vincent Fecteau's delicate sculptures grapple with arts and crafts and creative anxieties.

By Glen Helfand

EASY ISN'T A term that applies to Vincent Fecteau's thorny sculptures. Even though this San Francisco-based artist makes things from fairly common materials – papier mâché, old newspapers, Popsicle sticks, and other stuff you used in childhood – the finished products are oddly adult, effete, and sometimes unsettling. The sculptures initially resemble something that may have come out of a preschool classroom; they feel like dioramas that somehow didn't turn out quite right.

But Fecteau's work is deceiving and elusive. His practice revolves around expressing the experience of object making – grappling with all the issues and anxieties that come up when one is faced with the limitless possibilities of creating. The results defy categories and expectations. His three-dimensional collages invariably suggest things they are not. What looks solid is really lightweight. What looks like metal is spray paint on newspaper. What looks like something useful is purely decorative. What seems tossed off may have taken a year to nurture to its finished form. Fecteau's sculptures are delicate, lovingly crafted works masquerading as clunky modernist craft projects.

Quietly working out of a Richmond District studio, Fecteau has managed to captivate some influential art critics. Artforum's Bruce Hainley, in a review of this year's Whitney Biennial, in which the artist was included, describes him as "one of the most important artists of his generation," that generation being in its mid 30s. Experimental novelist and critic Dennis Cooper is also on record as a fan, pointing to shared interests in the tweaking of the formal conventions of their respective media. Such praises have generated hype around Fecteau's work, which may lead to some unrealistic expectations. His sculptures are quiet, almost meditative objects that don't reveal themselves easily. Thirteen pieces are presented in "Vincent Fecteau: Recent Sculpture," at the UC Berkeley Art Museum's Matrix gallery, one of a number of satisfying shows on view at the museum.

I must admit that for a while there I didn't believe the hype. The Berkeley exhibition, the artist's first one-person museum presentation, managed to convince me, however, that the work is more than just intriguing. The show is unique both in quantity and quality, given that Fecteau's most recent Bay Area exposures have been in tiny shows at Gallery Paule Anglim, exhibitions consisting of one or two sculptures (on which the artist reportedly works diligently for months or even years) that amplify affect and preciousness. (Be forewarned that one of Fecteau's stated artistic interests is affectation in and of itself. It's not everyone's favorite subject.) There was something ungracious and pretentious about those little shows – the kind of snooty scenarios that TV newsmagazines get worked up over in their periodic arts coverage – that is remedied by the larger grouping here. Perched on a series of high tables with white tops and unfinished wood legs and lit with even, not dramatic, lighting, the room looks more like a tidy workshop than like a gallery. It's a setting that highlights the idea of craft, of making things, and makes the sculptures – none larger than a bread box – more approachable and engaging. The scale is inarguably human, and the pieces are clearly handmade, which is a prime aspect of their appeal. You can't help looking into the interior areas of the pieces. The generous number of objects also makes Fecteau's elusive intentions a tad more understandable.

The various sculptures, all untitled and made in the past two years, sometimes seem like miniature avant-garde stage sets with oddly angled ramps and space-age catwalks. One piece, a white dome form, seems as if it were made of a cow-licked salt block or perhaps a hollowed out meringue pie – a pie trimmed with twine and adorned with scallop shells and half of a walnut husk, all painted white. If this thing were large scale, it would look like an igloo/polar-bear habitat at the zoo, but like all of Fecteau's work, it thrives on the tension between its small size and its monumental aura. You'll either imagine it getting bigger or see yourself shrinking down to run around inside the thing. It's a personality test.

The show also reveals that his work has grown in effectiveness. In the mid 1990s, when Fecteau first began exhibiting in the now legendary Mission space Kiki, images from pop culture were common in his art. Pictures of kitties and home accessories appeared along with the craft materials, grounding the pieces in more traditional collage practice. The elimination of identifiable references sends the projects in a more difficult direction, a place of formal concerns and surface tensions. There's static between the expectation of big and small, between art and craft and interior design. Not least, there's a battle between form and content. Fecteau's uncompromising works aren't meant to provide any resolution, but the process of pondering them can be mighty satisfying.

'Vincent Fecteau: Recent Sculpture' runs through Oct. 6. Wed.-Sun., 11 a.m.-7 p.m., UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berk. $4-6 (free Thursdays), free for 12 and under, members, and UC students and faculty. (510) 642-0808.