There’s a kind of hum that lives inside Rachel Jones’s paintings—the low frequency of something raw, unspoken, and vibrating just beneath the surface. In Dark-Pivot, her first solo show in Los Angeles and debut with Regen Projects, that hum becomes a full-bodied swell. The London-based artist has arrived not with a whisper, but with a visual exhale—six large-scale works and several smaller companions that seduce, confront, and crackle with a kind of chaotic intimacy. On view through May 10th, the exhibition is a restless, radiant plunge into the messy terrain of selfhood, desire, and perception.

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Jones has long been known for her use of the mouth as a recurring motif, and here it’s back—wide open, toothy, half-laughing, half-screaming. But these aren’t portraits. They’re fragments, feelings, mouths untethered from identity. Portals into something deeper. In Dark-Pivot, she stretches beyond the symbol itself, using it less as representation and more as disruption. The paintings teem with energy: the swirl of oil stick, the pulse of color, the way the edges fray and bleed into the void. And just when you think you’ve found a rhythm, the bricks appear. Yes, bricks. Stacked and angular, they anchor and interrupt. They mirror the teeth's geometry but function as something heavier. Where the mouths invite, the bricks barricade. But nothing in Jones’s world stays fixed for long. The bricks float, they shimmer, they crumble. Their presence shifts from literal to metaphorical and back again, refusing any one interpretation. It’s this refusal of resolution, of category, of neatness, that gives the show its bite.

Color, too, becomes a language of its own. Vibrant oranges press up against electric blues. Neon accents flicker like heat lightning. White acts not as blankness, but as erosion. Red wakes up the canvas with a jolt of life and negative space isn’t just absence, it’s tension, pause, and breath. Throughout the exhibition, Jones balances chaos with control, depth with irreverence. Cartoon references float through the works like ghosts winking toward the surreal and the absurd but it’s never a parody. It’s the visual grammar of childhood, desire, and everything we’re taught to suppress.

Jones, who studied at the Royal Academy Schools and Glasgow School of Art, has commanded attention at global institutions and recently designed the 2024 BRIT Awards trophy. But Dark-Pivot doesn’t rest on accolades. It risks, it reveals, it rips open the tidy containers we build around the body and says: here’s what’s underneath. Here’s what’s left when the symbols collapse and the color spills out. It’s a show that doesn’t ask for interpretation—it demands to be felt.

Here, Rachel Jones is not playing by the rules—she’s rewriting the language of form.