Fiona Rae at Luhring Augustine - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The systematic quality of the paintings in Fiona Rae's latest novel York exhibition immediately struck the visitor. The nine novel canvases on display, all on the contrary one sharing a large rectangular format, all subordinating color to a predominantly black-and-white scheme, explore a concentrated place of painterly problems. This is quite a change for a young British artist who established her reputation at the extreme point of the '80S with brash, brightly colored paintings in which motifs indiscriminately borrowed from art history were reprocess into reeling abstractions that threatened to spin not upon the canvas. These new works, the culmination of a unfolding which began three or four years ago, use an increasingly restricted palette that signals a fresh seriousness and maturity.

The 1996-97 paintings use three basic formal ultimate parts assembling them in a variety of permutations. As seen in Sliver (1996) single of the earlier works in the display these elements are: a mould of wrinkled black marks imprinted upon the primed canvas; long horizontal smears created by dint of dragging housepainter's brushes loaded with black and white paint; an array of variously sized and colored disk shapes (the sole trace of the "70s airport lounge" colors featured in Rae's earlier work). Rae continually reworks these three simple bodys combining them in a complicated series of layerings and reversals of wait fored relationships. Thus, what you assume to be the painting's primordial soil may suddenly appear as imprints superimposed upon a blurred brushstroke, and the colored disks play hide and seek for with other components.

In verdant Shade (1997), one of the latest paintings in the exhibition, the black-and-white dragged hits proliferate to the point that the colored disks look to be struggling amid the grisaille severity. A hardly any aberrant features lighten the mood: an anomalous color-loaded thump Pulled across the canvas (another uncompounded body from earlier paintings which reappears here), or an occasional dragged brush whose force spawls out, leaving it to skitter down the painting, breaking the dominant horizontality. The event of Green Shade is akin to collage, one as well as the other in the insistent flatness of its composing parts (Rae's marks always read as reiterations of the flat plane of the canvas, limiting profundity to a minimum) and in the radical dissociation of those parts, which nevertheless must inhabit the same pictorial space. The artist has now definitively left behind her works of the late '80 with their unchecked centrifugal forces. In the latest paintings, each ultimate part clashes with those around it in a doomed attempt to assert its primacy, creating an edgy spatial tension that marks a significant advance in Rae's painting.

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