FIONA RAE

"I’ve kept myself interested for decades by periodically changing the rules–the conceptual strategies–for the paintings, and thereby I’ve ended up working in series. Sometimes a series will last barely a year; sometimes it will last several years. And in 2021, I’d come to the end of a series, and I was bored, which is always how I know that it’s over. In desperation, I sprawled the words 'I can’t do this, NO, NO' onto a canvas that I was trying to conjure into life. It was messy and unresolved and not a painting that could be allowed to go out into the world. But this disruptive act gave me an idea for my new paintings, the Word series."

- Fiona Rae in "I can’t do this, NO, NO"

"My idea for the Word series is that each painting embodies a sentence or quote. There is no intention to illustrate the meaning or emotion of the particular sentence; instead, the languages of abstraction and literature twist around each other and, I hope, give rise to new and unexpected images and meaning. I have a long-standing interest in the skirmish between intelligibility and ambiguity; language is mutable, not literal, barely holding back the chaos even though it is our opportunity to understand each other and make sense of the world. Indeed, as Krazy Kat said so wisely, 'Lenguage is that we may mis-unda-stend each udda.'"

- Fiona Rae in "I can't do this, NO, NO"

"The act of painting is a gesture, a shape that the body makes when standing before a canvas in order to make a mark. So an abstract painting documents a physical dance or set of movements in space, resulting in footprints of language and form. I intend the painterly constructions in these new paintings not only to present abstract propositions, but also to articulate letters and words, with every part of the painting 'emitting language,' to borrow Roger Hiorns's description of his foaming sculptures. The pieces of painting are alive, the paint crawls and shifts, brush marks prop each other up as if they are 3-D sculptures, bits of background white lose their place in the plot and move to the foreground, interrupting carefully constructed multicoloured brush marks. The language in the paintings, both the abstract paint language and the literal word language, is nudged and jostled by whatever is next to it, and what’s behind it and what’s on top of it—let alone what’s hiding underneath it. Everything is contiguous and contextual and provisional, which is how I find the world to be …"

- Fiona Rae in "I can't do this, NO, NO"

"I approach painting as a conceptual game and/or endgame with an overwhelmingly physical manifestation that usually gets in the way of theoretical ambition and makes the whole thing a much more likeable proposition to be around. Decades later, I still find that the more embarrassing and unacceptable my ideas seem to be to the orthodoxy, the closer the paintings flirt with tricky areas like decoration, fashion, greetings cards, computer games, cartoons—the whole shebang of popular culture—the more interesting the painting becomes to me and the more inclined I am to get up off the sofa and pick up a brush."

- Fiona Rae in "I can't do this, NO, NO"