Rachel Jones is frothing at the mouth, baring her teeth and licking her lips. The young English painter has an oral fixation, and the result is a show that looks like a psychedelic bomb has been detonated in a dentist’s surgery.
For six years now, Jones has been painting teeth and mouths in thick swirls of Technicolor semi-abstraction. Gums and lips appear over and over. Incisors are twisted, snapped, broken. There are smears of red, shards of jagged white, lumps of fleshy pink, all lost in trippy hazes of endless clashing colours.
She has pushed her dental experimentation further than ever here at Dulwich Picture Gallery, where she is the first contemporary artist to take over the main galleries. She veers between ultra-abstract and damn-near-figurative, neon landscapes and pastel weirdness, and manages to balance it throughout.
The first three canvases are vast 3.6-metre diptychs that loom over you as you enter. It is as if you are about to get chewed up and spat out by the art. A big grin of broken pearly whites peers out beneath a brick wall in one work, a sloping smile is turned sideways on another. Smudged whites and blues on the third look like a shaky, paused VHS tape of an old cartoon. The brick walls are a new motif for her, like something Wile E Coyote is about to be smashed into, implying violence and joy at the same time. Cartoon walls, chipped teeth, static, pixelation, it’s like the abstract expressionists trying to draw Looney Tunes characters.
These are impressive, imposing, clever paintings, though at points their size and pleasant abstract qualities do make them feel a bit like trophy art for the mega-rich. The smaller pieces on wonky canvases in the central space are more intimate, and better as a result. Lips and teeth are stretched and manipulated, obscured and blown up. Here, you get a bit more of a sense of the emotional and conceptual drive of the works. The exaggerated lips are riffs on oversexualised femininity, nods to racial caricatures. Blackened teeth look like disease or destitution, pristine gnashers are bared angrily or flashing joyfully. Eyes might be the window to the soul in all the old master paintings in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s permanent collection, but mouths have just as much to say here. They are so heavy with symbolism, meaning and metaphor that you feel Jones could paint them for ever and not get bored.
Tongues start lolling out on the bigger canvases in the final room, drooping and sagging moistly and strangely, and you feel as if you have been taken on a dental journey: bright smiles giving way to drunken loss of control. It’s great, fun, hyper-colourful painting.
Has it evolved much over the past few years? Has it developed since Jones first painted a mouth motif in that little canvas from 2019 in the second gallery? Not hugely, and that’s a bit of a shame. I’ve seen and reviewed her work multiple times in the past few years and a bit more progression would keep things interesting. But I guess this is what happens when you find an obsession, and a way to explore it – you have to follow it through.
Besides, Jones has done something hugely difficult: come up with a unique visual language in contemporary painting. Managing that after centuries of art, decades of abstraction, is impressive.
Any contemporary art at Dulwich Picture Gallery is going to have to contend with being placed next to the likes of Rembrandt and Guercino. It’s a tall order, but with this retrospective of cartoon-indebted gnashers, Jones pulls it off – by the skin of her teeth.
Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons is atDulwich Picture Gallery, London, from 10 June to 19 October