Thoughts On Fiona Rae

I've had a week to reflect on my trip to Walsall to view Fiona Rae's exhibition of paintings 'Maybe You Can Live On The Moon In The Next Century'.  I described the trip in my last post:  here are some more thoughts about the actual work and Rae's practice generally, (in no particular order)...

• Fiona Rae is one year younger than me.  Looking at her achievement, I wish I’d got properly stuck into my own painting earlier.

Fiona Rae, 'Moonlight Bunny Ranch',  Oil & Acrylic
On Canvas, 2003

• Like anyone of our generation, Rae must reflect, daily, on how accelerating technological change has altered human perception over our half-century of life.  Her work certainly reflects it.

• Half a century further back, the breakthrough of Cubism first took full account of the World through a moving eye and shifting viewpoint.  In the work of an artist like Rae, painting explores a world perceived through multiple screen views, heavily mediated information streams and atomised attention spans.

Fiona Rae, 'The Woman Who Can Do Self Expression Will Shine
Through All Eternity', Oil, Acrylic & Gouache On Canvas, 2010

• We exist amid random image overload.  Rae celebrates the fact whilst preserving the most valuable gift painting has to offer, - the opportunity to take one step back and reflect on our current state: to reconstruct the moment thoughtfully.

• A life lived online assimilates all forms of human expression, high or low, altogether, all the time.  Rae constructs paintings from any and every imaginable type of motif.  The high art brushstroke coexists with the illustrator’s solid black outline: drips and splashes live alongside diagrammatic precision: kitsch Bambi deer and cutesy pandas float in passages of abstract expressionism: signs, symbols, characters and typefaces jostle for attention but withhold any coherent narrative.  Everything, altogether, all the time, - and glitter!

Fiona Rae, 'I Really Longed For This', Oil, Acrylic & Gouache
On Canvas, 2010

• Fiona Rae is a fantastic and elegant colourist, - she just can’t help herself.  Behind all that juxtaposed material, each painting establishes it’s own unifying mood of hue and illumination.  Like most interesting painters today she knows the value of synthetic hues and the importance of industrial surface coatings, Pantone swatches, RGB and CMYK colour values.

• The last century was made in America.  This century is being made in East Asia.  Fiona Rae was born in Hong Kong and often remembers travelling in Japan.

Fiona Rae, 'Press My Buttons To Give Me Food And Love', Oil,
Acrylic & Gouache On Canvas, 2006 

• Nothing takes overall priority in Fiona World.  Motifs rise to the surface of, and are reabsorbed by, coloured grounds almost immediately.  Spatial illusion morphs into picture plane and back again.  Each part seems to eat and be eaten by it’s neighbour.

• Viewing a Rae is like listening to the cut & paste music of, say, Flying Lotus.  Things appear, briefly fascinate and are cancelled by the next, unrelated event.  Nothing’s remembered afterwards: it’s all new again each time you return.  Somehow, a kind of grasshopper’s logic is achieved: a new world view is established.

Fiona Rae, 'My Favourite Puppy's Life', Oil & Acrylic On
Canvas, 2006

• These paintings emerge from multiple small decisions.  There is no unified compositional scheme.  The world each one inhabits appears to extend beyond the canvas edges.  They might be screen grabs from an ongoing continuum of information.

• I love the evocative titles Rae gives to her pictures.  Her web site's pretty good too.

Fiona Rae, 'Grotto', Oil, Acrylic & Glitter On Canvas, 2005

• Fiona Rae is a twenty-first century painter.  Painting is a twenty-first century medium.  Hooray for Rae!