Rae's A Smile: Even More Thoughts About Fiona Rae

Fiona Rae, 'Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheek In Powdered Beauty',  Oil &
Acrylic On Canvas, 2010

This post contains some more reflections on the work of Fiona Rae, following my recent visit to the ‘Painter, Painter: Dan Perfect, Fiona Rae’ exhibition at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery.  I’ve written about her on here before, after seeing her paintings in Walsall in 2012 [1.], and still stand by what I wrote then.  The current Nottingham show focuses on her most recent output, so I’ll concentrate on that now, hopefully without too much repetition.  As before, these are miscellaneous reactions to the work on show, rather than a coherent thesis about Rae’s project.

• The text characters that first drew me to Fiona Rae's paintings have largely disappeared in recent years.  I'll admit I miss them, but there's still no shortage of Pop content, and certainly plenty to captivate and intrigue in her current paintings.  They aren't without their crisper-edged graphic motifs, but the visual vocabulary Rae adopts now constitutes a rather more traditionally painterly language, seen overall.

• This manifests itself most obviously in her use of thin, sloshed-on and freely dripping paint.  Currently, this seems her favourite way of covering distance, and of establishing some form of nebulous ‘ground’ early in a painting’s development.  However such drips and veils also creep over earlier statements at times, lending much of the work an aquatic or partially submerged quality.  The lush, distinctly tropical ‘Shifting Sands Dusts Its Cheek In Powdered Beauty’, would be an obvious example of this.

Fiona Rea, 'I Need Gentle Conversations', Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2012

• Accompanying the inherent liquidity of Rae’s current work, there’s a general trend towards increased openness within it too.  ‘I Need Gentle Conversations’, in particular, is very economical, consisting of some pale sloshes of fluid paint, a little brushed calligraphy, and tiny, sparsely-scattered decorative motifs, over a plain field of sky blue.  ‘I Always Wish You Every Happiness With My Whole Heart In The Distance’ feels like its nocturnal companion piece and isn’t much busier, with plenty of solid black ground visible between it’s painterly gestures and drawn elements.

Fiona Rae, 'I Always Wish You Every Happiness With My Whole Heart
In The Distance', Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2012

• It might be tempting to dismiss some of this as superficial or tossed away, but I prefer to see it as Rae engaging with the concept of ‘less is more’.  After years of relative sensory and information overload, it feels like she’s keen to allow her paintings to breath and to find out how little is actually necessary to resolve them.  Some would argue that this is something most mature painters try eventually.

Fiona Rae, 'Does Now Exist?', Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2013

• It’s impossible to ignore the palpable Orientalism of Rae’s current vision.  Her own origins lie in Hong Kong, and so often now her imagery seems to look back to The Far East.  The paintings mentioned above all approach the feel of Chinese or Japanese watercolours and the suggestion of pendant branches drenched in blossom.  There’s more than a hint of Chinese textile design about ‘Does Now Exist’ and ‘Dusk Brings Your Eyes’, with their peacock palette and bunches of brushstrokes that loop into implied blooms or butterflies.  In ‘Mixing Feelings And Time’, gravity coaxes the unusually sombre, washed ground into a precipitous mountain landscape, above which flies a bold graphic device constructed from left-over Chinese dragon components.

Fiona Rae, 'Mixing Feelings & Time', Oil & Acrylic On Canvas,  2012

• This being the twenty-first century, there’s little resembling ‘authenticity’ in all this.  The cartoonish panda-bear motifs that crop up repeatedly in these paintings derive from cute mascots bought, not in Hong Kong or Shanghai, but New York.  Everything is mediated through global cultural filters of one sort or another.  Rae’s ‘foreground’ elements are often depicted with crisp, black linearity, suggesting the conventions of animation or comic book illustration.  Her predilection for strings of dots might resemble beads or bulbs, but also remind me of the tourism-driven market in Australian Aboriginal painting too.

• The Artist maintains that those devices are there to act as a foil to her more earnest or ‘meaningful’ passages of expressive paint.  There’s no doubt we are frequently arrested (and delighted), by the kitsch stars and cheeky faces peeping from between her more painterly statements.  However, I suspect it’s all pretty knowing really, and that even her more Expressionist strategies are exactly that, - recognisable signifiers.  She may throw plenty of ‘pure’ paint into the pot these days, but this is still more like the restless Post-Modern recombination of readable motifs, than the obscurity, portentousness or quasi-spiritual affectations of the New York School.  Indeed, is not the very idea of ‘meaningful’ paint not itself just another such sign these days?

Fiona Rae, 'Everything Will Be Beyond Your Thinking', Oil & Acrylic
On Canvas, 2012

• I’m always cheered by how Fiona Rae strips all the potential machismo out of abstract painting whilst leaving us in no doubt over her seriousness as a painter.  It would be easy to dismiss all those cuddly pandas, stars, decorative flourishes (and, in the past, - glitter), if they weren’t all adding to our sum of knowledge about how grown-up paintings might be constructed today.  Her small-scale collages cheerfully recall a teenage girls’ scrapbook, but are full of formal considerations and the intrinsic abstract qualities of their supposedly frivolous raw materials.  It’s like she’s constantly challenging the blokes to get on their critical high horses.

Fiona Rae, 'Untitled (Small Collage No 26)', Mixed Media On Archive Paper On Board, 2011

• There’s a feast of colour to be enjoyed in these paintings.  The near psychedelia of ‘Do Not Scream’ or ‘Shifting Sands Dusts It’s Cheek In Powdered Beauty’ emphasise her skill with a candy-coated synthetic palette, but elsewhere, she uses such hues as galvanising accents within far more sophisticated, even naturalistic schemes.  The earthiness of ‘Mixed Feelings And Time’ is a genuine surprise in this show, and it’s also important to recognise there are just as many darker paintings in Rae’s oeuvre as brilliant ones.

Fiona Rae, ' Do Not Scream!!', Oil, Acrylic & Gouache On Canvas, 2010

• In the past, Rae often seemed to arrive at compositional solutions through an embrace of scattergun randomness.  Nowadays she seems to marshal certain pictorial elements into almost arbitrary compositional armatures, - imposing order on looser passages.  This is particularly obvious where she has drawn straight lines between stars, to create an implied diagram of constellations.  In that last painting, it’s the cheeky pandas that are interconnected as they apparently float in cartoon space

Fiona Rae, 'Does Now Exist?' (Detail), Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2013

• Rae’s paintings have always gathered numerous parallel realities in simultaneous but seemingly indifferent relationships.  Disparate elements orbit, or even impinge upon each other but with no focal point or suggestion that they even inhabiting a common physical space.  There’s no coherent scalar logic there either, and the smallest of details can command our attention at any given moment.  What there is, instead, is a series of notional internal spaces, (or space/times), and even a suggestion of quantum or particle Physics as a result.

• For me though, the real analogy is of cyberspace.  These paintings seem to epitomise that sense of island hopping between parcels of information whose spontaneous connections occur, then evaporate, in a click or a swipe.  Where a more convincing inhabitable environment begins to coalesce, as in ‘Do Not Scream !!’, it still feels like a temporary situation constructed from unexpected, fleeting conjunctions.  I’m consistently impressed by Rae’s ability to inject our current cultural ADHD into a static (and traditionally contemplative), medium, whilst retaining all the stuff that makes painting great in the first place.

‘Painter, Painter: Dan Perfect, Fiona Rae’, continues until 6 July at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Lenton Road, Nottingham NG1 6EL.

Perfect and Rae will be talking about their work and conducting a tour of the exhibition between 2.30 – 3.30 pm on 28 June 2014.

[1.]:  Fiona Rae, ‘Maybe You Can Live On The Moon In The Next Century’, The New Art Gallery, Walsall, 2012.