Looking at a Fiona Rae painting is rather like trying to follow a conversation conducted between eight people in an extremely crowded room with the stereo turned up to full volume. Her pictures are defiantly overloaded confections which pull in so many different directions at the same time that there's no pinning them down. Bewilderment often ensues.

This might be regarded as a cunning ploy on the part of a young (27-year-old) painter, a way of proofing her art against ready explanation. To explain an artist's work, Rae knows, is to begin to be bored by it. But interpretation of a kind does turn out to be possible; and Rae's first solo show, at Waddington Galleries, establishes her as one of the most talented and, perhaps, most significant artists of her generation.

A Fiona Rae is, almost invariably, a shotgun wedding of one sort or another. Abstraction and figuration, Dubuffet handling and Disney subject matter, virtuosity and cackhandedness: the yoking together of incompatibles is a Rae trademark. Take Untitled (pink, yellow and green). Its ground, which consists of a series of skewed geometrical shapes, is flatly handled and rendered in hues - beige, dull orange, pink and institution green - that suggest an interest in the recondite colour combinations once favoured by demode interior designers. (The artist has talked of ''choosing the colours of 1970s airport lounges''.) But that's only Rae's starting-off point, the setting for a sequence of startling juxtapositions.
 
Scanning the painting's disturbed, interrupted surface, you find what might have been, in different circumstances, the beginnings of a tasteful abstraction after Hans Hofmann; but there are also some bewhiskered blobs a la Miro and a range of blurs and splats and drips reminiscent of painters as various as Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Julian Schnabel.

 Rae's work...

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