Making Art Out of Mess
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
What’s not to like about the paintings of Fiona Rae? Once you resign yourself to the logic of postmodernism — in which cacophony is just a way of describing harmony, and entropy is a spin on order — you are in the right mindset. You can sink your gaze into the baker’s dozen of boisterous, busy canvases at PaceWildenstein’s cavernous West 22nd Street gallery. You are at the mercy of what Dave Hickey in his catalogue essay terms “benign hysteria.”
Ms. Rae has sustained a high-wire act in quality “bad” painting since her precocious debut at London’s Waddington Galleries in 1991. Born in Hong Kong in 1963, she trained at London’s Goldsmiths College. Her peers there included Damien Hirst, who selected her for “Freeze,” the landmark 1988 group exhibition that launched the Young British Artists, or YBAs, as Britain’s neoconceptualist new wave was known. Her riffs on High Modernism — splicing together banal imagery from animation and pop culture with virtuosic painterly effects culled from the history of abstraction — sat well with the cool affront that characterized that movement. She was shown at the Saatchi Collection with Gary Hume, and in the notorious “Sensation” exhibition at the Royal Academy and Brooklyn Museum.
What has always set Ms. Rae apart from her iconoclastic generation, however, is an earnest commitment to easel painting. She revels in the joyful conundrum of making art out of mess, design out of disorder, and of exacting purposiveness out of doodles, squiggles, and balletic brushstrokes. Her stylishly cool deconstruction of painting over the last 15 years has sustained exuberant energy and panache. Each new series is sprightly and fresh: She puts the “Y” in back into YBA.
But she never really breaks ground — even within the “end game” painting culture of postmodernism, in which the notion of new ground is suspect and fraught anyway. The essential ingredients of her chemistry-lesson experiments with style have been in the textbooks for decades: a collision of high and low, an extraction of abstract patterns out of accumulated pop culture references, decorative order out of ornamental overload. Her aesthetics don’t differ substantially from those of Sigmar Polke, or of the German pop abstractionist’s disciple, Albert Oehlen. I would argue that Ms. Rae does it better, even if her quality control signifies conservatism. Her canvases are spunky, sumptuous, and unabashedly hedonistic in ways that are alien to those somewhat po-faced assailants of the aesthetic.
In her latest body of work, Ms. Rae revisits the kind of overt pop source material that characterized her early work. Where Disney characters found favor in the early 1990s, Japanese decals — a little deer in various colors, friendly little skulls, stars, flowers, and computerized lettering — as collected by schoolgirls are now her kitsch resource of choice. (The term “decal,” incidentally, derives from decalcomania, a Surrealist collage technique of which Ms. Rae is obviously familiar.) She copies these motifs with formidable precision and places them amid contrastively painterly strokes, drips, and splurges, so that her surfaces become dense lexicons of mark-making possibilities.
“I’m learning to fly!!” (2006) has 11 of these deer, in synthetic colors, scaling or projecting themselves from shapes and arabesques that read as an abstracted playground scaffold. As is typical of Ms. Rae’s compositions, there is a pronounced ground, in this case a contoured “sky” of pale blues, against which the various marks and motifs float in a flattened, shallow foreground space. Brushstrokes vary radically in terms of perceived speed, temperature, and body: There are smooth, slick curls of single-stroke black; squiggly backand-forth strokes of green accumulating into a bulbous form; cartoon-like outlines; Abstract Expressionist–redolent drips, and a hazy, candyfloss-like area of pulsating complementary blues, mauves, and purples.
All of the paintings have at once a totally saturated “all-overness” and a relentless unwillingness to submit to an organizing principle. This is what gives the show its unity — or, if you don’t buy her aesthetic, its repetitiveness. Ms. Rae proves that determined anarchy is as good a way to make art as intuited order. There is, in other words, method in her madness, or decorum in her decalcomania.
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On first impression, the severe streamlined abstraction of the celebrated Scots painter Callum Innes (born 1962) represents a marked contrast to Ms. Rae’s busy eclecticism. He is the Hollywood minimalist of choice, collected by Jennifer Lopez, among others: Where Ms. Rae’s appeal is to the aesthetics of high-low, Mr. Innes’s is to those of J-Lo. But the reductive Mr. Innes and the all-inclusive Ms. Rae tap similar tastes for cool décor and formal precision.
His fulsome exhibition at Sean Kelly includes large works on paper from 1990 and from 1996, one canvas from 1992, and several rooms of his new series of “Exposed Paintings.” The progression seems to be from serial arrangements of atmospheric dripped or applied marks to more schematic, hard-edged grids that contrast dense and opaque areas of paint.
Closer examination of the new series confounds any idea that the works are simply made. They appear to be neat arrangements of a dense black rectangle, a smaller rectangle in washy gray, and a block of semi-opaque color, a different color in each canvas. But edges intriguingly recall colors or tones from other, non-contiguous areas. It transpires that the artist’s process involves what he calls “unpainting,” a painstaking removal of areas that leaves faint vestiges in unexpected places.
It would be a flight of poetic fancy, however, to imagine a sense of absence and loss corresponding to Mr. Innes’s precious process of removal. The slight ambiguities he generates are of a formal rather than emotional character. The work is a handsome, unthreathening fusion of the rugged and refined.
Rae until December 2 (545 W.22nd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-989-4263);
Innes until December 8 (528 W. 29th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-239-1181).