Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons

Shown in the context of the historic paintings of Dulwich Picture Gallery, Jones’s new paintings extend the iconography of the mouth in modern art

Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2025. Photo: Eva Herzog.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
10 June – 19 October 2025

by SAM CORNISH

The fascination of the human mouth is Rachel Jones’s primary subject, both chief content and organising principle for her hallucinogenic abstract landscapes. In Gated Canyons, her new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, lips and exposed teeth appear like so many Cheshire Cats, corralling conflicting areas of scrawled and doodled decorative details. The large paintings shown here were all made for the exhibition, thereby neatly surmounting the problems of Dulwich’s awkwardly proportioned temporary galleries. Unhelpfully for a reviewer, all the new paintings share their title with the exhibition. Some smaller works date back to 2019, the year Jones left the Royal Academy Schools and began her oral exploration.

Rachel Jones, Gated Canyons, 2024. Oil stick and oil pastel on stretched linen, 250 x 360 x 3.5cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Eva Herzog.

At their best Jones’s large-scale paintings are punchy and arresting, quickly and graphically delivering their vibrantly coloured if ambiguous messages. She is part of a legacy of artists taking the mouth as subject including, among many others, Edvard Munch, Man Ray, Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lee Bontecou, Bruce Nauman, Joyce Pensato, Kerry James Marshall and Yue Minjun. Showing Jones in the context of Dulwich’s great collection of post-Renaissance western painting demonstrates how recent this iconography is, outside of medieval devils, the gaping maws of mannerist grottos and other monsters. Are any of the human faces on permanent display here, by Rembrandt, Poussin or Van Dyck, free enough from social and pictorial convention, or from tooth decay, to significantly open their mouths, yet alone reveal their teeth?

Rachel Jones, Gated Canyons, 2024. Oil stick and oil pastel on stretched linen, 360 x 250 x 3.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Eva Herzog.

Although their scale and colour need to be experienced directly, neither the physical presence of Jones’s paintings nor their revealed details are much to the point. Everything here works towards the energy of the overall image. Look closely at the paintings and they slacken, flatten out; step back and they zoom back to life. The weightless speed with which they come at the viewer is pitched between the billboard and the phone screen. Jones’s tools come from abstract painting, but her ends – or at least her effects – evoke the mass media. Transmitting a chaotic spread of raw and conflicting information with smooth efficiency speaks to a large gamut of contemporary experience. Though links can be made with earlier abstract artists, Jones has found her own territory to work in.

Within her fleetingly intense pictorial arena, Jones’s imagery of teeth, lips and smiles unsettlingly fuse the public and disembodied with the private and intimate. The mechanisms of mass-image production exploit millennia of experience that have taught us to find meaning in the mouth, an organ positioned, in ways constantly visible and always hidden, between our internal and external selves. Jones has similarly identified the power of the mouth to provoke meaning and draw attention, without giving away its secrets. Do these images offer a cheeky grin, a seductive or winning smile, or are we caught in the midst of a potentially enamel-shattering anxiety dream? Jones’s smaller paintings are different in kind from the larger. In these works, the intimacy of the mouth and the physicality of colour and mark-making are drawn much more closely and sensuously together. Jones has said that she is concerned with communicating specific aspects of Black experience, but surely at least part of the power of the motif is its potential universal resonance. Anyone might wonder if we are looking at our own lips in a mirror or at those of another, whether lover or stranger.

Rachel Jones, Gated Canyons (detail). 2024. Oil stick and oil pastel on stretched linen. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Eva Herzog.

When Jones steps outside the mouth as subject things become less definite, as with the unconvincing newly adopted brick motif in the tall verticals in the first room. Despite their visual similarities, bricks and teeth are very different in psychological import or formal structure, one highly specific, fusing inside and outside, the other flat and relatively endless. The first of these paintings perhaps also suffers from its (commendable) attempts to realise the more pronounced physicality of the smaller paintings at large scale. The large painting that successfully gets away from the mouth is in the final room, with its central quasi-monolith suspended motif, part truncated body, part phallus, part flower, part tongue. This painting shows Jones’s ability to confidently move beyond the attractions of her seemingly never-ending central subject.