PRESENTATION: Fiona Rae-Messages
Over the last 30 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. In the 1990s her 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.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Nathalie Obadia Archive
Fiona Rae is recognized on the international scene as one of the foremost abstract painters of her generation. The exhibition “Messages” celebrates thirty years of fruitful collaboration between the artist and the gallery. Fiona Rae first studied art at Croydon College of Art in London, before going on to study at Goldsmiths College in 1984. It was during this period that she met Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Michael Landy, amongst others, who all became known as part of the Young British Artists (YBAs) group. Together, they took part in the iconic Freeze exhibition organized by Damien Hirst in 1988. The rise of the YBAs to prominence in the 1990s was meteoric, so much so that today they embody the renaissance of the British art scene of the 1980s-2000s. For almost forty years, Fiona Rae has been developing a body of work marked by a singular and constantly evolving aesthetic. Her work is rooted in unusual combinations of the history of painting, the graphic arts, European and Japanese cartoons, cinema and music. This new corpus continues the “Words” series begun in 2021, in which sentences and words are embodied on the canvas as a continuing investigation into the nature of abstraction. Fiona Rae’s interest in alphabets and texts began at an early age; she initially studied English at university, before devoting herself entirely to contemporary art and to making paintings with an experimental approach to the possibilities of language. The artist’s supple and precise gestures conjure up sensual compositions featuring a succession of letters in full flow. Freed from their initial function, the typographic characters depicted become purely abstract visual elements. Letters crisscross, merge, evaporate then collide, generating bursts of pictorial energy. Paradoxically, this dispersion keeps each composition in perfect balance. Fiona Rae succeeds in reproducing the subtleties of language in the expressiveness of her brush marks. These simulate the intonations, plural sonorities and body movements that constitute the very essence of human expression. The observer’s eye moves between the abstract forms, looking for ways to decipher them. The titles could function as indicators, facilitating the legibility of the exhibited works. Some refer to a Shakespearean phrase, others to a Disney cartoon, a comic strip, or even to Metaphysical poetry. Each composition is singular in its ability to embody both comedy and lofty ambition magnificence and absurdity, presence and absence, constraints and infinite possibilities. Fiona Rae’s paintings slip in and out of legibility, generating time and again persistent enigmas in the pictorial plane. With its blend of great precision and the inevitable accidents of painting, Fiona Rae’s work reminds us that painting is alive and vibrant, and that this is true even in the 21st century.
Photo: Fiona Rae, Abstract 11, 2019, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 213.4 x 243.8 cm,© Fiona Rae, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia
Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 91 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris, France, Duration: 12/1-9/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com/
