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.
