It’s all Greek to Jenny Saville. The English painter’s new body of work combines ancient Grecian themes with ideas of digital representation. But are the results tragic?
The small works on paper here feature reclining nude bodies, just like you’d expect from Saville, and two big, close-cropped portraits of a young girl. But the picture planes are broken, interrupted, split apart by rectangular forms which reflect, refract, distort and twist the nude figures, slicing through their limbs and faces and genitals.
The works – all covered in electric blue and neon pink scrawls – nod to the Greek myth of Danae, who was prophesied to give birth to a child who would murder its grandfather, while the title of the show is a movable platforms to change scenes in Greek theatre. But all the visual tropes you see, those fractured planes, are inspired by something more modern: the giant screens of stadiums and mass events, the jumbotrons of modern spectacles. But they feel smaller and more intimate than that, like a view of the world constantly interrupted by phone screens, life as separate windows on your computer desktop. They’re hyperactive, unfocused paintings, by design. They’re about modern ways of looking, how attention is being constantly competed for.
But the idea that screens have changed how we look at the world isn’t exactly an earth-shattering revelation. Artists have been exploring that theme for decades now, and these new works by Saville don’t add a huge amount to that conversation, and they’re not that well executed either. It’s not great, but at least it’s not a tragedy.