ART CITIES: London-Rachel Jones
Rachel Jones is known for the distinctive way that she blends abstraction and figuration together. Her paintings are extensively informed by her research into the depiction of black figures in the arts from the 18th century to the present day. Her work explores society’s complex readings of the black body – how it is understood, how it is culturally reproduced and how those representations can potentially play a role in dismantling existing power structures.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive
Working in painting, installation, sound and performance, Rachel Jones explores a sense of self as a visual, visceral experience. She grapples with the challenges of finding visual means to convey abstract, existential concepts in her works. In depicting the psychological truths of being and the emotions these engender, abstraction becomes a way of expressing the intangible. The artist repeats motifs and symbols across her series to create associative, even familial, relationships between them, underscoring their kinship as part of her ongoing investigation of identity. In her solo exhibition, Rachel Jones presents her new series of paintings “SMIIILLLLEEEE”. In this series the artist investigates a sense of self as a visual, visceral experience, with the motifs of mouths and teeth suggesting vivid inner landscapes. Some of these new works are marked by a shift in her palette, with more muted tones and a reduction in patterning to produce quieter passages, while her flower motifs have become more prevalent. The figure is notably abstracted in her works, as Jones is interested in ‘using motifs and colour as a way to communicate ideas about the interiority of black bodies and their lived experience’. Abstracted mouths and teeth suggest a symbolic and literal entry point to the interior and the self. Within this vivid inner landscape, oral and, more recently, floral forms emerge and recede from view. Her expressive use of colour becomes a way of evoking, provoking or communicating with viewers, who bring their own lived experiences and cultural backgrounds to the interpretation of her works. The artist creates a tension or friction in her paintings through the kaleidoscopic palette, boldness of competing forms and interplay of textures. She has described her work as an “exegesis of color”, dominated by fiery reds, fleshy pinks and acid yellows against the counterbalancing coolness of blues and greens. The same critical eye that she turns upon questions of cultural identity and selfhood is applied to the language of painting itself, in works that reconsider both traditional and contemporary approaches to color and form. Exploring the role of language in engaging with images, the exhibition will also include site-specific text and sticker elements. Painted on a wall in the gallery and surrounded by her paintings, the song title “SON SHINE” becomes a prompt to think about the works and the words in a new light, as does the exhibition’s title. Vinyl stickers will be applied to the floor in dialogue with the paintings they reproduce, with the shifts in scale, materiality and viewing experience complicating the reading of these images.
Photo: Rachel Jones, A Sliced Tooth, 2020, Oil stick and oil pastel on canvas, 161 x 328 cm, © Rachel Jones, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery
Info: Thaddaeus Ropac, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 8/12/2021-5/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/
