Fiona Rae: 'Maybe You Can Live On The Moon In The Next Century'

Fiona Rae, 'Maybe You Can Live On The Moon In The
Next Century', Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2009

We had some lovely sunshine last weekend so I zoomed off to see Fiona Rae’s paintings at the New Walsall Art Gallery.  I’ve been looking at her work a lot lately in connection with my own work so it’s a fortuitous coincidence that the show recently transferred from Leeds to Walsall.  I’m ashamed to say it’s my first visit to the gallery and my first impression was that it’s amongst the more striking of the newer Art palaces, primarily because of it’s imposing five-story presence.

Walsall New Art Gallery

The gallery’s striking Brutalist block presides over an open square and redeveloped canal basin, typifying the brave new aesthetic that held sway in Blair's Britain just prior to the more recent economic collapse.  Such zones of misplaced optimism already look rather lost amidst the boarded shops and pop-up discount outlets that constitute our new urban reality.  Many of their stylish waterside apartments already seem eerily lifeless, - suggesting that harsh realities descended before anyone could even finish the first box of coffee filters.   Nevertheless, a striking modernist edifice being constructed opposite the gallery did intrigue me with its pleasing proportions, seductive dark-toned surfaces and achingly self conscious grid of square window frames fading from yellow to orange.

Having negotiated the steel band in the gallery foyer and glanced at a Damien Hirst exhibit, I climbed the building, pausing at stages to take photographs of the panoramic vistas from its windows.  I was particularly pleased by the sun-lit view diffused through drawn blinds that immediately recalled images by Gerhard Richter.

Gerhard Richter, 'Stadtbild M3 (Townscape M3)', Oil On Canvas, 1968

Fiona Rae’s show ‘Maybe You Can Live On The Moon In The Next Century’ covers work from the last twelve years and is a real thrill for those yearning for galleries full of ambitious, relevant, contemporary painting.  Like Paul Morrison’s work that I saw in Sheffield recently, Rae’s painting engages wholeheartedly with the inescapable changes wrought by digital technology on how we now assimilate images and interact both with the world of information and with information about the world.  Simultaneously, it’s fully committed to the potential of painting and the ways in which this ancient medium might still be amongst the most vibrant.

“Taken together, Rae’s paintings offer a dazzling inventory of the possibilities of paint: every colour and shade, every density and mode of application: brushed, dripped, drawn, stencilled, straight-ruled.  Thick and chalky, or thinned to a point of evanescence.  In her art Rae pays homage to the history of abstraction, from Miro to Kandinsky, to Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis – although none of these painters ever displayed quite Rae’s on-canvas exuberance and eccentricity.” [1.]

Fiona Rae, 'Tokyo Popeyes', Oil. Acrylic & Glitter
On Canvas, 2004

Fiona Rae, 'Angel', Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2000

  

The multiplicity of motifs and strategies on show in a room full of Rae’s might become enervating if it weren’t for their joyous good humour and sense of visual adventure.  Each painting seems to immerse the viewer in a chaotic dance of swirling sensory stimuli and imaginative possibilities.

“Helping us gain a steady, unambiguous grip on her paintings is evidently not Rae’s chosen primary task as a painter, which remains to reply – as exhaustively as possible – to the query: what is a painting and how can it be made?”  [2.]

Fiona Rae, 'We Go In Search Of Our Dream...', Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2007

The hour I spent with Rae’s paintings really cheered me.  I’m still processing the thoughts they triggered so I expect this mental thread will extend into another post.

Fiona Rae, 'Bold As AWild Strawberry, Sweet As A
Naughty Girl,' Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2009

[1.] & [2.]:  Gilda Williams, ‘You Balance The Picture In My Head:  On Fiona Rae’s Paintings’ in ‘Fiona Rae: Maybe You Can Live On The Moon In The Next Century’, (Exhibition Catalogue), London, Leeds Museums & Galleries/Ridinghouse, 2012.