A bitter tang of seaside salt and tears clogs the colours of Tracey Emin's collaborative exhibition with the late and revered Louise Bourgeois: you can take the artist out of Margate, but you can't take Margate out of the artist.
Nor would Emin want to deny her roots, which have provided so many of her stories and images.
In this latest demonstration of her talent it is, very specifically, the rough, rancid British ordinariness of her drawings – their Margate realism, if you like – that brings what would otherwise be rather boneless daubs by Bourgeois to caustic life.
I may as well be honest: the art of Tracey Emin means a lot more to me than the work of Louise Bourgeois, who died last May aged 98.
The latter's explorations of the human body always seemed a bit safe, even in their supposed danger – a critical respectability Emin is in no danger of sharing.
But she seriously admires the veteran New York artist, who reciprocated by painting not long before her death a suite of curvaceous gouache-and-water male and female anatomical images for Emin to add to as she pleased.
She emerges here as Margate's answer to William Blake. Seriously. There is something of the visionary artist and poet in her powerful idea of drawing tiny, intimidated figures climbing on, or kneeling before, Bourgeois' bodies.
Red and violet male forms become colossal objects of fascination as Emin's scribbled expressive nudes address them with words of love or rage in the exhibition, entitled Do Not Abandon Me.
Where Bourgeois paints a woman's tummy, Emin puts a foetus inside, a black insect-like creature, howling words of pain and tenderness.
I have never been more convinced of her talent. This collaboration between an artist whose death in 2010 was seen by many as the passing of one of the 20th century's giants, and our Tracey Emin might have been expected to make the Briton look small.
She suggests as much by visualising herself as literally dwarfed by the works Bourgeois gave her.
But it is a true collaboration and it is Emin who looks like the more authentic artist as she gives these lush images a spine of pain and truth.
• Do Not Abandon Me is at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, Old Bond Street, London W1 until 12 March
