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Rachel Jones is mistreating a canvas that reaches the roof of her study of eastern London when she arrives. She moves it behind a stack of paintings and maneuver against the wall, then does the same with a second job. But something is not right. “They are the other way around,” he says unfortunately. After more turn, Jones takes the canvases to the correct position. Together, they show a set of teeth and a pink tongue, surrounded by unpainted linen stripes, bright blue patches and neon yellow flashes. As most of Jones’ work, it seems very abstract at the beginning, then invites you to see new forms and forms.
Looking at the canvases, I can’t help thinking about the Mickey Mouse Pet Blood Pluto. The work of Jones has often presented open and teeth mouths as a form of ideas around expression and self, but language is a new reason. “It only appears when the mouth is open very wide,” says Jones. “There is an idea of something quite energetic or intense in painting activity.” The work is her Closed cannons series, part of which will be exhibited in Dulwich Image Gallery This June. The final paintings are being photographed, but even in their absence, the study is full of works in progress.
Jones is having a moment. Or, with greater precision, it is having another in a series of moments that have been happening since he graduated from the Royal Academy schools In 2019. The following year, it was assumed by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallerythat has Alex Katz and Anselm Kiefer on his list, and the Tate acquired one of his paintings for his permanent collection. The following years saw two of their unstressed canvases included in the Hayward GalleryThe contemporary painting survey, and one of its works is sold at an auction for £ 910,000 (its presale estimate was £ 40,000 to £ 60,000). In silence he left Thaddaeus Ropac in 2023 to go alone, a surprising movement for a young artist who was defended by a prestigious commercial gallery. Since then, she has put an opera (based on a novel by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black writer to win a Pulitzer), designed the Brit Brit 2024 Award and has been shot by Juergen Teller for Loewe’s SS24 campaign. In addition to the sweetwich exhibition, Jones has been commissioned by the Courtauld gallery To do two new jobs for your entry and entrance halls this fall, and she has just finished a show in Regeneration projects In Los Angeles, the first on the west coast of the United States. At 35, she is as successful as a young painter can be.
However, it is clear that Jones gives nothing for granted. I am surprised by your energy, warmth and consideration. She is the kind of great person who trusts enough to be excited about things. And she is very excited about, professing a love for everything, from Bunny Bunny to Tina Turner and Tchaikovsky. Similarly, its style is surprising: it carries a slightly combative combination of camouflage leggings and a cream lid. It doesn’t seem like an accident. Even when he is talking animatedly about karaoke, there is a steel tone for her: a feeling of wanting to do things in her own way, once she has resolved what it is.
Jones grew up in Brentwood, Essex, the son of a father who worked on him and a journalist mother. He loved cartoons and drawing as a child, and at first he thought she would be an animator, driven in part by the desire for stable work. A summer program in New York, when I was 17, stopped that: “I realized that I hated animation, it’s so tedious!” Jones nervously told his mother that he wanted to be an artist and that he prepared to study painting at the Glasgow School of Art.
I hope she dodges the question of why she left Thaddaeus Ropac, but is disarmed open. She enjoyed the opportunity to make shows and place work in public institutions, she says, but the routine of producing and displaying was not for her. “I never wanted the representation when I left the ra, but I felt overwhelmed and without an idea of how to handle decisions about where I exhibited my work.” Obviously, he firmly feels about getting beyond a audience of Mayfair-Gallery and does not like “the idea that painting is in his own small part of visual culture … I think it is a redundant way to understand art.” (When asked about his departure, the gallery refuses politely to comment). My impression, too, is that after discovering how the commercial world operates, Jones was hungry for other experiences.
Which explains how it became one of the faces of a fashion campaign. He found being photographed by Juergen Teller for Loewe “really strange”, but also fascinating. She has friends in fashion and was prepared for a long session, but Teller took the photos “in basically 10 minutes” on her iPhone. “I had a cheerful answer to that, because I move very fast and I have a very strong sense of direction when I am doing a job.”
Dulwich exposure is an evolution for her. The program is based on references to the Looney Tunes and Disney universe, but here has also used a painting from the gallery collection as a warning: Pieter Boel’s Head of the houndPainted around 1660. Responding to historical work has been part of a broader process of becoming “more inverted to look at something and understand how to express my internal response.” Jane Findlay, curator of the exhibition, says that when he saw the work of Jones in Chisenhale gallery In 2022, “I was impressed. I had a really visceral reaction that remained with me for a long time.” She highlights how Jones is “altering many paint traditions, is blurring the line between abstraction and figuration” and “expressing things that we feel but often remain tacit.” Jones wants the viewer to find the works in certain conditions. She is very demanding about how they are hung, preferring them at different heights. She wants the viewer “to move around them with her eyes, but also with her body … there is a lot of movement in me, so I encourage it in the visual experience.”
But she does not want to influence how others interpret her paintings. “As much as people want to speak for work, that is not my job and it’s not something I want to do,” she says. But she is happy with particular reactions. Once he invited a curator to the studio and showed him a paint made of bright red and yellow acids. Jones was “delighted” when discovering that the curator “found him overwhelming. After about 15 minutes, she said: ‘Can you keep that now, please?'” Children, he says, are also excellent to respond and, again, she is delighted when they find her “quite scary” or “difficult to look.” There is freedom in not having to please.
For Jones, a painting ends when it is “good enough, there is always more that can be done. It has to have a feeling for me that something else can be done”, what she calls the “point point.” Let go and advance in matters. And Jones has a lot to happen to.
Rachel Jones: Dulwich Image Gallery is in Dulwich From June 10 to October 19