Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons: Dulwich Picture Gallery has an identity crisis

Telegraph

2 days ago

It's hard to imagine a swifter ascent to art-stardom than that of the 34-year-old British painter Rachel Jones, whose exhilarating work is the subject of a new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Like many others, I've been tracking her career for a while, since one of her (mostly) abstract canvases – dense with lozenges and squiggles of colour so powerful that it seemed to bypass the retina and dance and stomp directly on the optic nerve – was included in a 2021 survey of contemporary painting at the Hayward Gallery, just a couple of years after she'd graduated from the Royal Academy Schools.
A little later, now represented by international mega-gallery Thaddaeus Ropac (although they've since parted ways, and Jones, a fervent gardener who lives in a southeast London suburb, today operates independently), she had a solo exhibition at east London's Chisenhale Gallery that blew away Dulwich's head of programme and engagement, Jane Findlay; this exhibition, the first devoted to a single contemporary artist to fill the gallery's temporary exhibition spaces, is the result.
Curated by Findlay across four rooms, it contains lots of new work, including eight vast pictures characteristically executed in oil pastels and oil sticks – all of which, in a taxonomic nightmare for tomorrow's art historians, have the same, intentionally oxymoronic title, 'Gated Canyons', and date from 2024.
On this evidence, Jones's recent output is the same, but different. Like her slightly older peer, Allison Katz, she remains interested in the mouth as a motif: while, at first, Jones's pictures appear entirely abstract, on closer inspection, various shapes – like beads on a necklace, or an earthworm's segmented parts – typically coalesce into gigantic teeth and lips (supposedly inspired by the chops of cartoon characters), here occasionally accompanied by a lewd and dangling tongue.
Lesser, more hackneyed artists consider the eyes as the window to the soul, but for Jones – who's interested in interiority, and uses colour to depict grotto-like landscapes of feeling – these free-floating, disembodied grins are portals to caverns of emotion, where colours bloom like coral or mineral encrustations or moss and lichen. At Dulwich, she also introduces a new figurative element into the mix: squidgy-looking, cartoonish bricks, which (like mouths) suggest the point at which inside and outside meet.
Her smaller works – executed on bark-like slivers of paper and canvas with uneven edges – are bumpier in texture, muddier in hue, and less satisfying than their larger counterparts. In an odd move in these bigger paintings, Jones – with one exception – leaves bare swathes of the underlying brown linen, which imbues them with an unfinished air.
Still, this sludgy negative space can't neutralise her almost caustic pinks and reds, and they radiate self-assurance and charisma – so much so that a dominant pair on display in the low-ceilinged third gallery feels horribly hemmed in.
Quite what they are doing at Dulwich is less certain. Supposedly, Jones's work is in 'dialogue' with the gallery's permanent collection of Old Masters: specifically, and surprisingly, a tiny painting, from c. 1660-65, of the head of a reddish-eyed, white-coated hound, presented against a plain, olive-dark background, by the 17th-century Flemish painter Pieter Boel. While Boel's picture does, I suppose, depict a mouth, it has as much relationship to Jones's paintings as I do to the Dalai Lama.
I understand that Dulwich – which, this autumn, will unveil a new pavilion where under-eights can play – is striving to broaden its audience. But it mustn't evolve into a split-personality institution that, in the pursuit of novelty, and contemporary art's crowd-pulling magic dust, becomes blasé about its core identity.