ART-PRESENTATION: Fiona Rae-Abstracts
Over the last 25 years Fiona Rae has developed a distinctive body of work, full of restless energy, humour and complexity, which has set out to challenge and expand the modern conventions of painting. She is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who rose to prominence in the 1990s. Throughout her career, she has been known for having a portfolio of work that includes elements of energy, and complexity. Her work is known for aiming at expanding the modern traditions of painting.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gallerie Nathalie Obadia Archive
In “Abstracts”, her new solo exhibition, Fiona Rae shows a new collection of canvas paintings and more intimate works on paper, her “Abstracts” in line with her recent formal research. Her preliminary work in gouache and watercolor, less well known and more rarely exhibited, constitutes a set of ideas from which she creates her paintings and thus allows us to catch sight of their development. The artist has chosen to present these two practices in a fixing that takes into account their mutual contributions and correspondences. The set of works presented is in a certain continuity with the series of “Figures”, which she began in 2014 in a grayscale palette. In 2017, the artist departed from these grays, completely eliminating black and its derivatives, in favor of pastel colors that tended toward artificial, magical hues. Her work on chromatic gradation became the backdrop for a theatrical choreography of shapes, pictorial gestures, and graphic signs, that were on the edge of the figurative world. All of Fiona Rae’s pictorial efforts reside precisely in this subtle paradox: the abstraction must bring forth—then conceal—a universe of possible imagery, of familiar figures. The resulting works were ethereal, graceful landscapes, with arabesques, brushstrokes, arrows, vaporous and chimeric movements, that played the role of actors in a specific game, that of the painting. As the artist says “Each painting presents a set of brushmarks and each brushmark presents itself to the best of its ability. If there are references and associations beyond the actual presence of each mark, then that is the inevitable leaking, and delight, of our language systems; the impossibility of a hermetically sealed code”. The “Abstracts” series clearly indicates her position: Fiona Rae claims the influence of abstract pioneers such as Kandinsky, which she subtly combines with Pop Art, and these recent works seem to evolve towards a more prominent dynamism, more acidulous colors, and accentuate the contrast between curves, undulations and tense lines, spontaneity of gesture and reflected «mapping» of the painting.
In the 1990s Fiona Rae’s early polyglottal inventions, arranged serially across the blank page of the canvas, gave way to dense paintings that depicted a world of interdependencies fractured by cubism, with all the hustle and energy of a metropolis. Rae rapidly moved through the playbook of abstraction in the 1990s, devouring and re-presenting the tropes and fixations of modernism through the lens of movie and televisual culture, quick to grasp the rapid changes in contemporary visual culture, and insert her painting practice into the present. In 2000 Rae’s paintings began to reference a world keyed to the computer screen, echoing in painterly analogues many of the new visual conventions familiar to a post-Photoshop generation. Fonts, signs and symbols drawn from contemporary design and typography appeared, whilst more familiar abstract marks and spontaneous gestures worried the autonomy, legibility and function of these graphic shapes, debating a new synthesis of painterly languages. In 2004, her lexicon further broadened to include small figures or cartoons whose status was left intriguingly ambiguous. They served to point up the metaphysical and artificial dimensions of abstract painting, whilst also providing an empathetic point of identification for the viewer that invoked a more personal reading. Her recent titles often purport to be exclamations or statements, but like her paintings, they elude definitive explanation and can appear simultaneously dark and charming, anxious and insouciant.
Info: Gallerie Nathalie Obadia, 18 rue du Bourg-Tibourg, Paris, Duration: 10/1-7/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com
