KAREN WILKIN
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The pieces shown at 49th Parallel demonstrated Fauteux's most recent
response to these ideas. Several were snubnosed, truncated "arches," like
apses sliced and wedged back together at unexpected angles, to partially
enclose and define mysterious, charged spaces. From some views the dark,
rounded interiors were visible, while from others, the viewer was excluded.
The pieces were too small to be enterable, yet they were as much about
place as they were about object, calling up associations of dim votive spaces
and smooth exterior walls.
The most difficult work in the show and very likely the best was a kind
ofoversized "basket," a gathering of chest-high plates of steel bound together
rather haphazardly with brass. The piece was, at once, all exterior, all con–
tainer, and all potent void. Fauteux's inclusion of shiny brass in other pieces
risked looking artful, but in the basket it made sense, a tense strapping that
held everything in place. Fauteux has been worth keeping an eye on for
some time. His new work makes this truer than ever.
Another pleasurable surprise was provided by Lee Tribe's show of
rather atypical (and very good) sculpture at Victoria Munroe Gallery, at
about the same time as the Fauteux exhibit. Tribe, a British emigre,
increasingly visible in this country, served an apprenticeship to relatively or–
thodox contruction in steel, first becoming known for delicate curvilinear
structures, but for the past few years he has been assembling objects that
have as much
to
do with African fetishes as they have to do with, say,
Gonzalez. (They often recall David Smith in his kinkier moments, though.)
Tribe's growing interest in mass, as opposed to openness, led him to treat his
linear structures as armatures, wrapping them in lengths ofchain and loading
them to make extraordinarily dense, spiny and slightly threatening objects.
Although Tribe was clearly interested in an almost monolitic bulk, he
continued to use the small increments of his lyrical works to build up masses,
sometimes to the detriment of the finished pieces. He was aware of the
problem, yet seemed uncertain of what to do about it. "Then," as he puts it,
"it struck me."
An
accident in the studio last summer forced Tribe to work at near–
miniature scale, sitting at a bench, for several weeks. Ironically, the taut,
small-scale pieces he produced are among his most monumental works to
date. The best seem enormous.
As
a group, they are refreshingly direct and
often quite fierce, and the effect of a room full of these pugilistic little objects,
many of them in size and form like clenched fists, handsomely arranged on
long, multi-level tables, was startling. Some of their power comes from the
exceptionally clear relation of their parts, some from the tightness of the
contours in the best of them. The robustness of these pieces is all the more
surprising, given their jewelry-like scale. If Tribe can carry this over to his
