Fiona Rae. Vista

"Vista" is the first solo exhibition in Spain by British artist Fiona Rae and presents a selection of work from the last three decades. The exhibition includes paintings from prominent collections such as Tate and the Fundació "la Caixa", alongside a recent loan to Es Baluard Museu from the Fundación Barrié.

 

The title "Vista" invites us to imagine a possible future, alongside its somewhat ironic suggestion that we are encountering the paintings as a beautiful view, with the open gallery spaces providing scope for multiple vantage points. The exhibition creates a dialogue between different periods of paintings and provides a setting within which to contemplate the evolution of Rae's unique pictorial language and her explorations in the realm of abstraction.

 

Over the last four decades, Fiona Rae has developed a distinctive body of work, full of restless energy, humour and complexity, which sets out to challenge and expand the modern conventions in painting. Playing with notions of legibility, imagery and the figurative, Rae's large abstract canvases feature controlled yet improvised compositions which give a sense of instability and even elegant disorder. The paintings are clearly inspired by the contemporary experience and the evolution of art and culture, with influences ranging from Dürer's woodcuts, Chinese calligraphy, abstract expressionism and pop art to graphic design, fashion, cartoons and video games.

 

Rae works in series, each beginning with an idea or a set of conceptual rules which are then explored to produce paintings which respond to the surrounding cultural environment with a powerful emotional and intellectual resonance. Each series might be a development in some way of the previous ideas or a completely different proposal. This exhibition includes examples from various series from the late 1990s to the present day.

 

In the late 1990s, Rae started the "Black & White" paintings, which feature brightly coloured discs punctuating a black-and-white ground, whilst black-and-white brush marks in constant motion activate and unsettle the surface. The "Black" paintings followed, suggesting a science fiction scenario and combining a hermetic and regimented ground with brushstrokes laden with sensuality and movement.

 

In the 2000s, the artist began to use Photoshop to plan the geometric elements of her paintings, opening up a new way of working. The "Fufanu" paintings present a painterly world connected to the computer screen, reflecting in pictorial analogues many of the new visual conventions familiar to the digital generation. Rae pursued these ideas in the "Font" series, and in 2004 her lexicon expanded to include cartoon images intermingled in a universe of abstract painting whose status remained intriguingly ambiguous. The resulting two series, "Font, Image, Pour" and "Panda", stand out for their striking colour palettes that run riot across the surface in lyrical and yet joyfully iconoclastic compositions.

 

As the titles of the "Greyscale" and "Pastel" series suggest, these paintings were based on specific colour palettes and sought to abandon cartoon imagery to focus solely on the expressive possibilities of the brushstroke. Each painting suggests an ethereal figure, conjured up by arabesques, vapours and chimerical movement. Three charcoal drawings are also presented, made alongside the "Greyscale" paintings and inspired by a visit to see Chen Rong's 13th-century Chinese scroll "Nine Dragons" at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. With the following "Abstracts" series, Rae further developed the exploration into the evocative consequences of minimal brush marks and colour harmonies.

 

Fiona Rae's latest body of work, the "Word" series, experiments with sentences that are captured on canvas as an ongoing investigation into the nature of abstraction and language. Rae's interest in literature began early and she studied English at university, before leaving to go to art school. There is no intention to illustrate the meaning or emotion of the phrases; instead, Rae creates spirited and playful compositions with typographic characters freed from their initial function. The letters intersect, merge, evaporate and even collide, going on to generate bursts of pictorial energy and, as Rae has said, "I hope, give rise to new and unexpected images and meaning."