The painting belongs to the series of ‘Row Paintings’ which were created in the late 1980s in a time when painting was seen by many as outmoded and irrelevant. Challenged by this climate to find a way to recontextualise and thereby reinvigorate the possibilities of painting, Fiona Rae began her pioneering engagement with the medium and formed her own visual language.

 
The ‘Row Paintings’ provide a first glimpse of the conceptual framework that the artist has maintained and developed further since that time in more than fifteen sometimes extensive and diverse groups of works. Rae’s improvisations – painted directly on the canvas within self-determined parameters – employ a visual language that shows recurring painterly as well as semiotic conventions.

 
Looking at the canvases of the ‘Row Paintings’, one might note the calligraphic and painterly gestures arranged in rows, exuberant forms reminiscent of pictograms or an alphabet of painting. The artist speaks of “characters”, almost figurative elements that follow a precise yet free choreography on the stage of the canvas. It is with these means that Fiona Rae explores painting from the axis of both high and popular culture, making use of diverse references such as Abstract Expressionism, Philip Guston’s late work and the surreal comic strips of George Herriman.

 
Compositionally, the ‘Row Paintings’ are strictly structured, the pictorial material organised in rows, similar to a notation. This order also gives the series its title. However, the supposed rigidity, the conceptual framework, is repeatedly torn apart and negated by the gestural inserts. Splashes of colour and gradients disturb the strict design and demand their own space. The tension and suspense that the paintings create is strongly determined by this fruitful conflict: to conjure up a painterly vocabulary and grammar in order to subvert and light-handedly transform them using the same means.