KultureFlash ::: Artworker of the Week ::: Catherine Yass

ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #18

Moonlite Bunny Ranch, 2003
Oil and acrylic on canvas
231.1 x 190.5 cm

Imagine if eye-candy were sweet and sugary, but sharp with letters, slinky with il-lust-trative imagery, slick skeins of paint, hinting at the sound of music doused with break-beats... Born in Hong Kong (1963), Fiona Rae has recently moved away from the full-on theatrical "fight-to-the-death" ontological paintings of the early '90s, to their current Kandinsky-on-acid state! With her largest commission hanging in front of the Beeb's Broadcasting House while it's under renovation, and following her mini-retrospective at the Carre d'Art, Nimes, France, she's currently having her first London show since 1997 at the Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Show runs from Tue 14/10 till 15/11
Private view Fri 17/10 from 6:30 - 8:30pm

Sherman Sam: In a recent interview you said that your paintings are heartfelt, yet there seems to be a cool intellectual quality to them.

Fiona Rae: Is it not possible to have both?

SS: Well I suppose we tend to think that there's a difference between them.

FR: I guess making coolly heartfelt paintings is one of the things I'm interested in.

SS: So you're saying that both those qualities exist in your work?

FR: I think that you have to have a guiding structure when you make a piece of work. Sometimes that structure can be informed by something heartfelt, and at other times by a cooler, more cerebral process. It's paradoxical to have the two approaches coexisting but of course most artists work like this. I think there's something about the spontaneity and riskiness in these paintings that's emotionally sincere -- maybe "heartfelt" sounds a bit like you're at the mercy of something you can't control.

SS Your paintings appear less dissonant now. They're different the way David Salle's are, unlike the visual dissonance of Abstract Expressionism. It seems to be a more graphic kind of dissonance.

FR: Maybe it's a more subtle dissonance. My paintings of the early '90s looked like a fight to the death between the different kinds of things on the canvas. For me there are now other ways of keeping things taut and tense.

SS: Now that you've mentioned the '90s paintings, Stuart Morgan once wrote about your paintings in regard to juggling... About that tension of waiting for failure.

FR: I think that failure is an integral part of the paintings. Only through failing do you come to a place that you couldn't have imagined beforehand where something exciting and unpredictable starts to happen. I'm sure every painter would say that. Julian Schnabel called painting a "bouquet of mistakes".

SS: Comparing your current work to your older paintings, there is distinctly a more graphic quality to them. Where has this come from?

FR: Since then the way things look has changed so much around us. The computer thing has exploded. A Mac was something I'd vaguely heard of a decade ago, and was terribly expensive, but now everyone's got one. I'm interested in what's going on now with graphics and movies and TV screens. For example these fantastic fonts that people come up with which hover on the edge of legibility and yet we all know how to read and understand them. What I like about using these graphic letters in a painting is the way they operate as abstract shapes but at the same time have this other life. I think this reflects the way the way we negotiate all these signs, objects and information which surround us. I also enjoy the idea of painting being bang up to date. Why shouldn't it reflect what's going on now? In a sense not to do that is arch. To flip back 50 yrs and have it look as though your daily lunch is old French newspapers, cheese and a bottle of wine. I want my work to look like now. I can't see the point of not joining in.

SS: Is there a more graphic quality to your new paintings?

FR: There's certainly a hard-edged graphic element to them now -- I use stencils to reproduce signs and symbols from contemporary fonts. These have a banal mechanical look to them which is in contrast to the more expressive and inflected elements of painting and drawing in the paintings. I'm drawn to using these graphic elements because they reflect the world around us; these fonts that hover on the edge of legibility seem to represent the way we as an audience understand how to negotiate and decode the languages of film, TV, advertising, whatever. However, it's important that within the paintings they also operate as an abstract language, engaging in a formal dialogue with everything else.

SS: Tell me about Signal, your commission for the BBC.

FR: I was asked by the art consultants ModusOperandi to put forward a proposal for an image for the front of Broadcasting House while it's being rebuilt. After a million BBC committee meetings it was finally approved. It only exists as a virtual painting on my computer and as this huge inkjet image on vinyl, 22 metres high. I used Photoshop to combine and reconfigure elements from scans of some of my paintings, with special effects like flares and drop shadows. For example, the black and green brushmarks were once red and white toothpaste-colour brushmarks. What's exciting about doing this is that the technology now exists that makes it possible for painters to make large scale public art. Unlike sculptors, painters don't usually get to dominate the street like that!

SS: Where do your painting titles come from? Are they mostly from songs?

FR: No, they come from lots of different sources. I used the Siouxie and the Banshees song for the title of the show, Hong Kong Garden, but there are other titles like Tsunami, Storm, Roadhouse... I choose titles that have several different lives in them. They're not one line, straightforward this-is-what-it-is titles.

SS: Do you find fashion an influence?

FR: Yes, I like to look at clothes, although I find shopping itself stressful. You can see great things like olive green serge with a bright turquoise glitter moment on it.

SS: Well Prada's more fun than Gagosian, right? (laughs)

FR: (laughs) Well that depends on who's showing.

Sherman Sam is on the staff of KultureFlash, and is also an artist and writer. He has written for Blueprint, Contemporary, Mordern Painters and Third Text, while his paintings were included in the travelling exhibition Sight Mapping earlier this year. His works are currently in a group drawing show Flix at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, and a painting show Photoptosis at the Bilkin Gallery in Bilbao, Spain.

Image © the artist, courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery