Rachel Jones: say cheeeeese

Chisenhale Gallery, 12 March - 12 June 2022

Let's get one thing straight: this is not a painting show. These are drawings. Rachel Jones uses oil bars and pastels to draw on the canvases displayed at a former factory near Victoria Park, now Chisenhale Gallery. The drawings are all-over abstractions, but unlike 20th century abstraction, they're not concerned with form so much as with surface, visual effect and, believe it or not, art history. 

But before we get onto that . . . they're dirty and scruffy. Take the unstretched canvases pinned either side of a temporary partition wall. They're covered in studio residue, finger marks, staples, bits of crap off the floor: it feels at odds with the Larry Gagosian gallery-ready that goes without saying everywhere else.  

When I visited there was a fly wandering over the first drawing in the show (they're all called say cheeeeese). Aware that art history is full of dupes who get fooled by painted flies, and also being a strict vegetarian, I didn't swat it away. So it wandered about, spreading germs from acid yellows to mars black, charting the short-lived patterns and the claggy textures, crossing the sharpest tonal contrasts and the softest gradients, all of which from a human point of view forms an intense patchwork of incident and excess.

There are no objects or figures, but this drawing, like the others, is full of patches of observation from the world and from art. To the top right is the shimmering effect of light on the surface of water, which looks like a study from Monet's water lilies. Intentional or not, this is a clear citation. Today, more than at any other time, there is no such thing as an innocent eye. 

In another say cheeeeese, there are oblique perspectival lines towards the bottom which open up some depth, as well as bringing in a vanload of baggage from the Italian Renaissance, which is compounded by the near-circles drawn towards the top centre of say cheeeeese. Apelles' freehand circle, anyone? Giotto's O? Rembrandt's Self Portrait with Two Circles at Kenwood house? 

These artists tap into an art-historical trope where skill and intellect are registered by drawing a perfect circle; doing the same, they claim to be the heirs of the former greats. I wonder, is Rachel Jones really, really ambitious? 

Well, her circles ain't perfect, and there's an ironic distancing happening too: the citations are more postmodern than old master. And I don't think the smaller drawings in the show pull it off. They lack the generosity which is so appealing about the big ones, and the tiny dabs feel fussy and overworked. 

That said, Jones is not doing too badly. Somehow I can imagine Giotto floating around some shimmering valley deep in the astral plane, taking a look down at planet Earth, past Vicky Park, into the Chisenhale Gallery, straight at say cheeeeese, taking it in, and saying: sick.