Author Description

In Special Fear Fiona Rae's current exhibition at Pace, she continues to combine divergent stylistic elements and dissonant sources within each canvas. The exuberant buoyancy of her 2006 show has been replaced by a darker, gloomier palette and cropped landscape-like spaces. Marc Glimcher, who wrote the catalog essay, warns that the images are not easily analyzed in terms of their meaning. The disparate elements can be analyzed for their stylistic origins, but they are finally just resonant images and forms which allow the artist to construct a painting. In spite of critics' efforts to reduce the inhabitants of Rae's painting to a semiotic flashcard nothing could be further from the native experience of making the painting or the experience of viewing it.