“I want to make paintings that are surprising
and that have something new to add to the history of painting.”
Fiona Rae
Abstract
Critical’s John Holland wrote in his 2013 review of British abstract artist
Fiona Rae’s paintings “She makes eye
candy for the conceptually wear.” It’s a proposition Rae had addressed a couple
of decades earlier in a Bomb
Magazine interview when she stated “People have a lot of preconceptions
about what paint language means: pink paint isn’t serious, but black and grey
is, and I don’t understand that.”
And if her current exhibition is anything to go
by a re-think of the commonly held concept of “eye candy” maybe required, for
as the publicity states “These are abstract compositions teetering on the edge
of figuration, expressively rendered in black, white and tones of grey.”
Coming out of the milieu of the 1980’s Young British
Artists (YBAs), Rae has the distinction of being the lone dedicated painter of
the group. As she told the Guardian
newspaper in 2009 “What I love about painting is that it embodies a series
of thought and feeling processes. It's all there on the canvas as a record. I
can put something on the canvas, consider it, adjust it, remove it, replace it,
add to it, conceal it, reveal it, destroy it and repair it. I can be in a good
mood, a bad mood, a cheerful mood or a destructive mood - it's all useful.”
Whilst using acrylic and gouache paint, oil paint
holds a special place in her esteem. As she states “Oil paint is the most
fantastically malleable substance: once you've figured out how not to turn
everything into a sludgy grey, oil paint remains wet long enough for endless
changes of mind, and because of the way the pigment is held in the oil, it is
beautifully luminescent.”
Like her Goldsmith College contemporaries the
conceptual aspects of today’s art are part of her makeup. For as she has said “I
suppose I think my attitude to painting is fairly conceptual.” To which
she has added “My paintings have a fictive space, an invented abstract space
that holds all the contents together - but I think that anything can go into
that space, from heartfelt expressive marks to deliberately fashioned
self-conscious brushstrokes to graphic signs and symbols to images of skulls
and bambis.”
As The Brooklyn
Rail’s William Corwin wrote in his 2012 review of
her exhibition Fiona Rae: Maybe you can live on the moon in
the next century “Rae’s paintings are very much objects to
be admired; windows into worlds in which she is mistress, giving the viewer
over to a semi-recognizable, occasionally comforting, but mostly alien
dreamscape.”
Rae’s
current self titled exhibition is on show at London’s Timothy
Taylor Gallery until the 30th of May.
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