Oxford's exhibition of new British painting glories in its modernistaesthetic: paint for its own sake, free of reference. But is it beautiful?
One of the more intriguing works in "About Vision: New British Painting in the 1990s", at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, is Untitled (emergency room) by Fiona Rae; and one of the things about it that intrigues the most is the question of its title, its lack of one (or its lack of a lack of one). If the artist had truly wanted her painting to be untitled, surely she should simply have called it Untitled. Conversely, if she had wanted it to have the title Emergency Room, surely she should just have called it Emergency Room. Her chosen title opens up all kinds of ambiguities. How entitled to the title "untitled" is a work the untitledness of which is thus parenthetically contradicted?
Throughout her relatively short career as a painter Rae has contrived to be paradoxical. Her new pictures are as disorientating as their nomenclature. Untitled (emergency room) is a picture of something about to take shape before it has actually done so. It is, so to speak, a resolved image of an image that has not yet resolved itself. On a grey ground, swirls of black and white paint form a pattern that is incoherent but that also seems on the verge of taking on comprehensible form. Within this churning foam, many brightly coloured discs, some of them partly occluded, form a constellation. This elegant and slightly sinister painting of something or other in a state of crisis was partly inspired, the artist has let it be known, by the admirable special effects in the film Terminator 2. Rae particularly enjoyed the ingenuity that went into the creation of that film's villain, a...
