Rachel Jones: Dark-Pivot

Regen Projects is pleased to present Dark-Pivot, London-based artist Rachel Jones’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in Los Angeles. The exhibition’s new paintings pose fundamental questions about how the body–and traces of its movement–is comprehended differently when pushed beyond its figurative or abstract limits. Powerfully wielding negative space alongside color palettes and motifs drawn from cartoons, Jones recalibrates the psychic motor that drives our perception of bodily forms and traditional landscape painting, carving out new terrains between the real and the imaginary.

Dark-Pivot continues Jones’s use of the mouth motif, for which she is well known. In her paintings, mouths are a cipher for the body and its psychological interior, grasping at the elusive or opaque qualities of one’s innermost thoughts and emotions. Six large-scale paintings in the exhibition, all entitled Dark-Pivot, also introduce brick walls, a powerful metaphor for solidity or rigidity that stands in contrast to the malleable complexity of the open mouths. This juxtaposition unsettles essentialist interpretations of facial expressions, or the boundaries between subject, background, and foreground. As a whole, the exhibition offers a blend of intrigue, humor, and curiosity that overflows from the gap between symbols and their various meanings.

Notably, Jones utilizes a new color palette for this body of work, prominently featuring oranges, blues, and whites, accented with neon tones. The artist uses white to represent decay, entropy, or destruction, but counteracts it with red to energize or awaken certain elements of the paintings, such as tongues or lips. Exploring relationships between colors is essential for Jones and augments her deft ability to apprehend multiplicity, mapping out complex landscapes that depict harmony, chaos, secrecy, and vulnerability all at once. The absence of oil pastel and the use of negative space is a significant formal and conceptual tactic throughout these works. For the artist, untouched linen anchors certain works to have a traditional perspective, but also acts as an indeterminate void space that intervenes upon the rest of the work. Jones translates the unpredictable swerve of human desire directly onto linen surfaces, embracing compositions that pulse and glow without finality.

The use of bricks in Dark-Pivot bears a geometric similarity to teeth but symbolizes structure, order, or the “building blocks” that partially establish Jones’s works in real, decipherable settings. One large-scale painting, at over eight feet tall, shows bricks stacked up to half of the canvas’s height, representing a spatial designation, mark, or physical boundary amidst the vivid, ethereal color washes of the painting’s top half. Jones’s use of bricks is partly inspired by the late Chinese-American painter Martin Wong, who used bricks to form floating hearts, traditional buildings, or enclosures. Two medium paintings in the exhibition take on this function as building blocks as well. Both are thickly saturated with turquoise and orange, catalyzing the sense of tactility that’s seen in the larger paintings on view.

Three paintings in the exhibition use Jones’s signature mouths and teeth, directly referencing cartoons such as Looney Tunes, to bolster their dream-like or fictional textures. The artist first paints the mouth, appearing throughout the exhibition as mostly open, or indicating a point of access, exposure, or in the midst of laughter. The painting’s background is charged with abundant color fields of yellow, blue, red and orange, populating the traditional composition of an outdoor landscape painting with motifs and concepts from Jones’s interior world.

In Dark-Pivot, bricks and teeth do not represent impermeable membranes, but demonstrate how the artist maintains subtle traces of her process and hand within her surreal landscapes. She forms an elaborate network of raw feelings that circulate, coalesce and evolve without end, fully activating painting’s boundless potential to give shape to the unknown.