Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons – ‘riotously colourful’ works from an ‘exhilarating’ painter

Still in her mid-30s, Rachel Jones “is about as successful as a young painter can be”, said Fatema Ahmed in the Financial Times. Since graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2019, the artist has seen her work, which “seems wildly abstract at first, then invites you to see new forms and shapes”, sell for hundreds of thousands, and be acquired by institutions including the Tate. She has exhibited widely across Europe and the US, and has even put on an opera.

Now, she has been selected to become the first contemporary artist to mount a show in the main space of London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery. The recurring motif in Jones’s work is the human mouth, said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian – which she renders “in thick swirls of Technicolor semi-abstraction”, with teeth, gums and lips appearing “over and over”, with “smears of red” and “shards of jagged white” adrift in “trippy hazes” of colour. Her Dulwich exhibition features a new body of work, comprising paintings both small and large, as well as other pieces created over the past six years. It’s “a show that looks like a psychedelic bomb has been detonated in a dentist’s surgery”; these are “impressive, imposing, clever” paintings.

Jones is an “exhilarating” painter, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. The new works “radiate self-assurance and charisma”. Among the most striking are eight “vast” pictures in oil pastels and oil sticks which all, confusingly, share the same oxymoronic title: “Gated Canyons”. Consisting of sequential shapes – “like beads on a necklace, or an earthworm’s segmented parts” – they coalesce into “gigantic”, cartoonish teeth and lips, sometimes accessorised by a “lewd” dangling tongue. Colours “bloom like coral”, while some pictures contain “bare swathes of the underlying brown linen” that give them an unfinished air. They look great, these “grotto-like landscapes of feeling”, but what they’re doing in Dulwich is uncertain. The works are supposedly “in dialogue” with the gallery’s Old Masters, specifically a tiny painting of “a reddish-eyed, white-coated hound” by the 17th century Flemish artist Pieter Boel. That picture contains a mouth, but otherwise, “it has as much in common with Jones’s paintings as I do to the Dalai Lama”.

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Jones sees the mouth as “an entry point to the interior self”, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. As the orifice through which we speak, it’s a gateway for us to express emotion. “The unspeaking mouth is remarkably eloquent, evoking the oversexualisation of women or racial caricature.” But intellectualising the artist’s “riotously colourful” work misses the point: these are paintings designed to provoke an “instinctive” response. Stare long enough, and the “vivid reds, spearmint greens, rich purples and emphatic yellows” here will “envelop you”. They are “expressive works that are meant to be felt – and, given time, they leave you tingling”.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21. Until 19 October