Deutscher and Hackett

In the year 2000, the late and great art critic John Berger wrote that a still life, as a contrived arrangement of selected objects, was intimately linked with the domestic art of keeping house, and thus, ‘Every still life is about safety, just as every landscape is about risk and adventure.’¹ Contravening this assertion, Jude Rae’s still life SL312, 2013 bristles with underlying menace, the threat of explosive combustion poised in a delicate equilibrium.
 
A deceptively simple presentation of three items: an open cylindrical jar made of glass, half-filled with a clear liquid, a small hand-held fire extinguisher and a bulbous gas bottle, Rae’s painting strips away the warm and nostalgic notions of still life to instead interrogate the very act of perception and representation. With characteristic introspection, she writes: ‘Traditionally loaded up with allegory and religious symbolism, the trappings of status or domesticity, I prefer its [still life’s] other inclinations: to detail, to the overlooked, even the abject. Unlike other genres which lend themselves to expression and narrative, still life is a strange and largely mute mixture of the analytical and the sensual.’²
 
Distilled to their most essential expression, Rae’s still lives evoke the airy sensuality of Chardin and the lyrical subtlety of Morandi. Like these masters of the genre, Rae’s direct presentation of her chosen items imbues them with an abstract monumentality, an effect of the sustained attention she had lavished on such everyday items. This is a painting of the spatial and tonal relationships between these objects, of the subtle reflections and refractions of the light around their contours. Although outwardly appearing static and solid, Rae’s objects are unbounded, their vibrating edges tend to disintegrate into the atmosphere before our eyes. Smooth and hard surfaces become velvety with her precise, chalky brushstrokes. Built up in accretions, Rae’s colour values are carefully orchestrated, conjuring a pearlescent sheen on the gas bottle’s shoulder and collar, and a yellowed griminess around the rim of the glass cylinder. The water-refracted red stripes of the fire extinguisher in the fluted surface of the glass imply an exact viewpoint held by the artist, the slightest deviation from which would ruin the present optical effects.
 
Grounded in extensive theoretical knowledge and savoir-faire, Jude Rae speaks of her studio as a laboratory and numbers her still-life paintings in a continuous sequence beginning with the initials SL. Within the confines of this formal rigour, Rae’s still lifes have evolved from academic depictions of swathes of drapery in the 1990s, to arrangements of vintage crockery, to a suite of still lives featuring gas bottles, coinciding with the artist’s relocation to Canberra in 2002. While her early fabric paintings overtly depicted the act of concealment, the later table-top arrangements play with the same concerns through combinations of open and closed vessels, transparent surfaces and hermetically sealed containers.
 
SL312 is painted at eye-height, dead straight, and with minimal shadows. With nowhere to hide, the silhouetted cluster of objects is slightly off-kilter. The gas bottle, seductively ballooned, stands apart. Its weighty material presence and pressurised interior overpower the two narrower objects, the fire extinguisher even seeming to cower behind the jar. The taut balance of the entire painting is held within the vertical sliver of air between these objects, a weighted pause in the centre of the image.
 
1. Berger, J., ‘The Infinity of Desire’, The Guardian, London, 13 July 2000
2. Rae, J., ‘In Plain Sight’, in Jude Rae: a space of measured light, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2018, p. 7
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH