Art is usually considered to be a representation of beauty. Since the era of Ancient Greece, the art has been filling our perception with images of battle-winning heroes, like the ones in 300, and flawlessly beautiful nymphs who lead sailors to death with their singing. Pictures of obese female bodies, dead cows and pig corpses do not fit to this strict, traditional definition of art. These are the main topics of Jenny Saville’s stupefying oil paintings.
Saville’s enormous, larger-than-life-size paintings stun the viewer with the contrast of the traditionally-schooled brushwork, and the topics which are less commonplace. Her brushwork captures the play of light on masses and mountains of pure flesh -which often happens to be her subject. For example, her Passage (2004) displays a highly confusing image of a transsexual person who is in the process of changing the gender. The choice of topic sheds daylight on a taboo.
Most of her paintings present different kind of social taboos or themes which usually generate disgust. Therefore they are highly controversial, people either love her or hate her. Or just don’t know how to react. Personally I am part of the first group.
Selective realism. This is the way I would describe the style of hers, though she likes to be referred to as a pure realist. Her use of colours looks sometimes highly stylised in order to gently guide the eye of the viewer from one point to the other on the gigantic canvas. The highly pigmented blobs of colour that form the shape transform into a slightly abstract mix of tones when you get closer to the picture.
Dead cows, obesity, blood, the expressiveness of strong lines, somehow depict-able angst – they make one wonder if Saville sees the world as an ugly place. In one of her interviews she has answered: “Oh, fantastical – fantastically ugly. … There’s no truth, just a series of lies.” — mh, a series of lies.
The Worldaholic
