‘…broad toothy grins…’
(Striking phrase used by the curators about Rachel Jones’s artworks)
Dulwich Picture Gallery is probably best known for hosting small but beautifully formed exhibitions by classics such as Rembrandt, amid shows about niche twentieth century artists such as Emily Carr, Edward Bawden, Tirzah Garwood.
But in a break with tradition, this summer they’ve been hosting their first ever solo show by a living contemporary artist, Black British artist Rachel Jones, born in 1991 and so a sprightly 34 years old.
Usually the gallery is divided into 3 rooms – then an intermission for the little atrium leading into the mausoleum – then 3 more rooms. For this show the 2 middle rooms have been knocked together to form just four rooms in all.
But the main point to make is that the exhibition includes a new body of work from Rachel Jones, comprising eight large-scale and six smaller works, commissioned specially for this show, alongside a selection of paintings created during the last seven years.
I counted 22 paintings in all.
Room 1. Comic abstraction (3 paintings)
The first room contains three paintings which immediately introduce you to Jones’s style, subject matter and approach.
Installation view of room 1 of Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo by the author)
Big For a start they are huge works, enormous, standing 3 or 4 metres high, a little imposing or overwhelming in their scale.
Bright Second thing is they are big, bright and colourful, very bold, brash and fearless use of oil colours straight out of the tube and onto the canvas.
Unfinished Third thing – the dynamism of act of painting, the strokes and dazzles and sizzles of big bold paint, often leave large areas of brown canvas or linen (both are used as supports) untouched, as if the work was interrupted or, maybe, only a certain amount of actual painting was required to convey the idea, and the rest of the canvas is left blank, testifying to the sufficiency of the painting process, that just so much need be stated, and no more.
This, the curators tell us, is a relatively new development in Jones’s approach:
Her new commissions… use the weave and tone of the visible linen as a new direction in her use – and non-use – of colour. Acting as a starting point, this ‘breathing space’ adds a new sense of vulnerability to the paintings…
Abstract? Fourth thing is they appear, at first sight, to be abstract i.e. non-figurative i.e. not depicting anything in the real world but concerned with their own internal relationships of shape and colour.
Gated Canyons, 2024, by Rachel Jones. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Eva Herzog
But each of the four rooms has an explanatory wall label and these amplify and nuance your first impressions.
Felt process For example, regarding the large areas of untouched canvas, Jones explains that her approach is ‘a felt process’, that she intuits the shapes and designs and colouring as she makes the work, using it to express emotional states and interior landscapes until that expression is complete regardless of whether the canvas is covered.
The mouth Easier to grasp is what turns out to be the central motif of the show which is the mouth. Only after careful explanation in several of the wall labels did I realise, particularly in the third room, that there is something being depicted in these paintings and it is the human mouth with a particular focus on the teeth.
When I flicked through the promotional photos for the show I thought this painting was a sort of gondola in Venice and I took the horizontal ripples beneath and above it to be light shimmering on water or reflected on walls. Not a bit of it. It is a mouth, turned into a semi abstract motif, and the rectangular objects sticking up out of it, white frotted with black crayoning on the left, and pink rectangles on the right hand side – those are teeth!
Gated Canyons, 2024, by Rachel Jones. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Eva Herzog
In Jones’s own words:
‘The repetition of a mouth filled with teeth is how I play with, subdue, elevate or put meaning and content into ideas around representations of self and Blackness. It’s both specific and very general.’
And in their wall labels the curators tell us that the mouth is ‘a portal between our inner and outer worlds’, it is a symbol of our ability to express ourselves. But it – and we – exist in a social context and so Jones sets her semi-abstract mouths in landscapes, albeit highly abstracted landscapes: the self in the world; expression in a broader social context. Some of the ways you could interpret this recurring motif.
Room 2. Expression and containment (14)
Having soaked all this up in the first room, the second, long, gallery completely changes tone and scale.
There are 14 works in this room and they are (mostly) small, A4 sheet of paper size. Not that they’re regular shaped, they’re deliberately irregular in shape, with sometimes rough edging – oil stick and oil pastel on canvas or paper which are then hung a little away from the gallery wall rather than fixed flat against it.
Installation view of room 2 of Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo by the author)
The effect is to make the space irregular, to jazz up the space, which is helped by the way the 14 works are hung in little groups or clusters, themselves making the remaining space asymmetrical.
Gated Canyons, 2024, by Rachel Jones. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Eva Herzog
As you can see from this example, again with the teeth, in fact this might be the most obvious figurative example of the mouth & teeth motif in the show.
The mausoleum
Anyone who’s visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery knows that it consists of one ‘corridor’ of long galleries which you walk along, and is punctuated half way down by the entrance to the mausoleum which houses the sarcophagi of the gallery’s founders, art dealer Noel Desenfans, his wife Margaret, and painter and art dealer Sir Francis Bourgeois.
This architectural oddity allows the curators to use this space for a variety of purposes, for example in the ‘Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmaking’ exhibition it had a video screen showing films explaining the techniques of print-making.
For this show it turns out that back in June the gallery hosted a live music event featuring three musicians – Afromerm, Felix Taylor and Rohan Ayinde – who created a ‘sonic response’ to the exhibition. And this soothing ambient music is played on a loop in the mausoleum, with its amber-coloured windows, thus creating a chill, relaxed little zone…
A vinyl recording of which you can buy on the DPG online shop.
Room 3. Mouth as landscape (2)
The human mouth again, stuffed with big teeth, set in swirling, multicoloured, abstract landscapes.
‘It represents a portal to our inner selves and the way we interact with, interpret and express our thoughts and feelings… The mouth has been central to her exploration of psychological landscapes, Blackness and self.’
Maybe. Although in art as literature, often the ostensible subject or motif isn’t really the point, it’s just the framework or scaffolding you need to build the real work on, which is about the style.
So in the work on the left (shown in full, above) you can really see the shape of the curved lower jaw and teeth dominating the composition but you can also see how this semi-figurative image is set in a weird and surreal, brightly lit ‘landscape. And the same goes for the painting beside it, the one I mistook for a gondola 🙂
Installation view of room 3 of Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo by the author)
Room 4. Language is colour (3)
The final room has another three enormous works. I haven’t yet mentioned two other themes to be found in the works, namely bricks and cartoons.
Installation view of room 4 of Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons @ Dulwich Picture Gallery (photo by the author)
If you scroll up to the second image in this review you’ll see how the motif of rectangular white teeth rather naturally morphs or evolves into the idea of bricks or rectangular tiles. But bricks are notably different from teeth as symbols. The mouth and its teeth are an organic image of a human being, the self, the interface between inner and outer – whereas bricks very much represent the hard external world, the built world, civilisation.
So in the picture on the right in the photo above, you can see how a very straightforward depiction of a brick wall at the upper right is overlaid with the characteristic curve and big white blocks of Jones’s toothy grins: the organic and expressive and spontaneous overlaying the planned and objective and social worlds.
It’s an interesting effect. It crossed my mind that the show could have been arranged differently and maybe more logically to start with paintings entirely based on mouths, smiles and teeth and only introduce the development of bricks half way through – it might have helped you see it as an evolution of a motif…
Cartoons It turns out that one of her sources of inspiration is cartoons, not Fine Art cartoons by Raphael et al, American Loony Tunes, the kind which feature Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner. Once it’s pointed out you realise the big smiley tooth-packed mouths can be seen as cartoon-like. And maybe this is related to the extremely bold and bright colouring.
Gated Canyons, 2024, by Rachel Jones. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Eva Herzog
Being told this makes you reconsider images which might have had a scary, a surreal and slightly sinister vibe, into garish comic images of madcap adventures in dayglo landscapes. In fact I got chatting to one of the gallery assistants who’s been sitting looking at these things for three months and she said the painting above reminded her of the Roadrunner, with his characteristic high-speed zigzag motion which leaves behind a vivid zigzag trail. That’s how she interpreted the sharply zigzagging lines which start at the bottom of the picture and, once they’re pointed out, do indeed carry on up to the final orange squiggle at the top of the painting.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are some Roadrunner cartoons: note the dayglo primary colours and the unstoppable zigzag trails the roadrunner leaves behind as he zooms across the landscape.
Gated canyons
OK but what does the title of the show, ‘Gated Canyons’, mean?
When I read it, and saw the very bold bright abstract images, I assumed Jones was from America which 1) ever since the Abstract Expressionists hasn’t been afraid of enormous canvases with bold colours – and 2) is also the country which gave us the gated community – and 3) is, of course, the country we most associate with ‘canyons’ because of all those western movies (although cañon is actually a Spanish word).
The wall labels don’t actually address the issue it’s left to the promotional material to explain that the title is a deliberate oxymoron or yoking together of two contradictory ideas: canyons are natural, organic and open-ended features of the landscape, whereas ‘gated’ obviously implies human culture, closure, constraint and restriction. It sets up a binary dynamic which maybe epitomises the works’ other binaries – soft mouths versus hard bricks, figurative versus abstract, human versus landscape, high art technique inspired by kids’ cartoons.
Conclusion
To be honest I’m not sure I really liked any of these paintings. Maybe I did or maybe I liked certain elements of them, specifically the horizontal shimmers which I carried on thinking of as reflections of light on water even after I’d read that they weren’t. But I found the obsession with mouths and teeth, big grinning mouths and dazzling white teeth, a little eerie and unnerving and wasn’t totally convinced by the brick motifs. they could just as well be cells from a biology textbook and mean something completely different.
But it’s a very strong look. For some time it’s been hard to know what to do next with painting as a form – critics (and artists) have been predicting the death of painting for a century or so, but it keeps struggling on. These works show that Jones has invented something new, a new look and style which is both original and distinctive.
Maybe the best augur for Jones’s future is the sheer amount of merchandise in the gallery shop. It turns out that her boldly colourful patterns transfer very well onto tote bags, scarves, fridge magnets, notebooks, postcards, posters and all the usual merch. That’s one way of measuring success…
Related links
- Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 19 October 2025
- Rachel Jones website
Books & Boots 