Timothy Taylor Gallery

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Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings by Fiona Rae.

In this new body of work, Fiona Rae employs a battery of painterly marks and graphic signs that jostle for space on the fictive plane of painting. Rae revels in juxtaposing elements gleaned from a raid on art history’s store cupboard: layering Abstract Expressionism, Tachism and Minimalism alongside contemporary global references from graphic design and popular culture.

The mood is ambiguous – flowers, toys and cartoon characters initially suggest a sweet, almost cloying world, yet Rae’s dark and brooding palette combined with virtuoso washes and veils of paint suggest dissolution and decay – all is not well in this candied, melting world. These new paintings reveal Rae’s continued fascination with the graphic tropes of the Far East: a dragon’s scales, exotic feathers and flowers are all rendered with the humorous insouciance of Hokusai crossed with Asterix. Dark-edged, agile forms also predominate; snaking across the canvas in Pleasantly Happy, 2007, they insinuate and seduce – reminiscent of the limbless luxuriance of a Japanese erotic print, eventually sprouting suitably suggestive tufts of hair. In Chamber of Ten Thousand Flowers, 2007, dark lianas support a variety of life: painterly smudges, squiggles and clumps of paint suggest a myriad of exotic flora. This unsettling combination of sweet Eastern promise and bubble-gum neon Pop with something darker and threatening, reminiscent of the Northern European Apocalyptic tradition of Albrecht Dürer or Hieronymous Bosch, conjures a vision of an interweaved heavenly hell or hellish heaven – all the while demonstrating the pure joy of paint itself.

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