Catalogue text to 2005 exhibition at Watson Place Gallery by Christopher Heathcote

It can be difficult to come to grips with new paintings; especially when the works in question are abstract; more so again when they seem to jolt back against the realm of visual appearances. The viewer must start from total scratch. Because you cannot move in from what has been said before, to see whether the visual experience of the works confirms or contradicts prior opinions. Looking at new works asks that we try to connect with the imagination of the person who made them, attempting to deduce—however falteringly—not so much what they mean, as how they mean. Perhaps one does this systematically, maybe it is more random; either way as you mentally work from painting to painting, seeing how they interconnect and differ, one must sift out commonalities and, thereby, begin to confront how the paintings 'make sense'.

Scrutinising Rod McRae's latest works—quickly running the eye over them before looking in detail—a set of categories arise. The immediate one quality is visual ambiguity, for so much about these compositions is being kept deliberately ambiguous and indefinite. Occasionally we do make out what seems a recognisable image, but much of the time it is out there just beyond reach. A form is kept deliberately vague, as if the intention involves being indistinct. This is an effect of the way that forms are realised with his paint, although it would be incorrect to suggest that he ceases to render things at a point well before they become crisp or clearly defined. No, he actually starts with quite concrete images and pushes them towards ambiguity: he moves from clarity to ambiguity. The outcome being that McRae renders visual phenomena so that all is fused together in this unbroken mass, an entity slightly resembling billowing smoke or massed clouds.

It is worth paying attention also to the quality of the paint he has mixed, for emulsions of this density and pigmentation can only be set down in thin, semi-transparent layers. They will necessarily add to the sensation one has when stepping back and looking that the eye is encountering tinted vapour, that colours come through from something beneath or beyond the surface. Of course, here and there the paint will be more opaque and substantial, which thereby gives a detail the appearance more of wind-blasted sandstone or fossil-like formations.

This observation necessarily raises the issue of the image and the role it plays in these works. Quite simply, traces of figures are everywhere. Nearly every composition contains suggestions of human forms: sometimes we can make out a rather literal lone figure, although often they appear as a series of blobby anthropomorphic masses. To complicate matters here, McRae often appears to be reaching into art's past with his fugitive imagery and quirky compositional formats, using bits of historical styles in a rather witty manner: Cubist edges à la Juan Gris are all over the place, for instance; certain figure groups overtly suggest Breughel, and some of the more visually sumptuous exhibits bring to mind the Venetian Baroque (especially those grand canvases filled with ranks of angels in puffy clouds) in their colouring and illumination.

Just when the viewer has reached this point, and you believe that you are beginning to define what the paintings are about, one goes back to the first work and starts looking all over again—and then you find that McRae regularly breaks his own rules. Yes, there are the wispy, vapour-like abstractions; but there is also that disturbing hulk adrift on a cheerless sea. The painter's hand is not constricted by a finite style. Which explains why there is an implicit richness about such work, an imaginative excess. There may be certain resemblances that appear across several of his paintings, yet each one is so tellingly unique. McRae is an artist who doesn't repeat himself. Very clearly he is striving to paint in his own terms, about his own ideas, using his own voice, and those things are growing and changing. And it is because of this that you can keep coming back to his works, noticing anew something you didn't before. These works are not made to sit passively on a wall as innocuous decor; they are intended to be looked at and actively contemplated. The act of looking is continually, and inexhaustibly, fresh, and, because of that fulfilling...

Christopher Heathcote, Aug 2005.