Fiona Rae at John Good - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Snapped up by dint of the Waddington Galleries right on the outside of art school and shortlisted for the gymnast Prize soon thereafter, Fiona Rae, the English wunderkind, continued to make a dazzlingly impressive spectacle of herself in her first one-person present to view in the U.S. Her novel series of similarly configured, tightly packed large paintings gives not upon a flat, artificial light which - like cinematic lighting - warns the viewer that something is up Abrupt spatial transitions, erratic regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements and the use of denatured colors (off-purple off-blue off-green off-reds) identify these canvases as post-modern sites self-consciously fabricateed out of a number of contradictions: spontaneity and calculation, emotional intensity and psychological distance, the serious and the comic, abstraction and representations of abstraction. As the organ of vision scans these united but annotated pictures - United (r and pale blue) United (purple and brown) for example - it appears to collide with Malcolm Morley-like detonations held together by means of Hans Hofmann rectangles, while biomorphic whimsies on the outside of Miro are overlaid through Richter smears, Lichtenstein brushstrokes, Polke scribbles and de Kooning, Schnabel and Basquiat gesticulations - as well as intimations of Picasso, Pollock Motherwell and thus forth, all deconstructed and reassembled. Rae's work is a mini-museum of abstract art, where modernism's anxiety of influence has been checked in the coatroom.

The surface is fragmented, layered. interlocked rectangles and squares are interrupted through curvilinear segments combined in allusive shapes, suggesting architecture, Mickey Mouse's ears, the shaft of a tilted, free-floating penis, bullet or lipstick. Smaller rectangles, more [i]or[/i] less painted with melting edges, a certain number of looking like they've been chop with pinking shears, are balanced through splashes and rubbings of paint. Rae finishes by the agency of crossing the canvas with lengthy thick, looping lines, bold diagonals, drips - which race up, down and sideways - whorls, scratches, tangled nest of small X-stroke barbed-wire hatchings and rapid-fire lob of color which burst like fireworks or bombs, freeze-framed.

Irritating, ingratiating, challenging and self-deprecating, Rae's art is a cacophonous tour de force of simultaneous readings. Juggling modernism's baggage, she gleefully detains it all up in the air for a spellbinding flash But beyond that, what advances through and sustains the work is an artful innocence and profoundly felt, instinctive pleasure in pushing paint around. For many, this remains a means to authenticity.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group