Flesh. Undulating, gooey flesh. All the great painters of the stuff – Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Peter Paul Rubens – depicted our bodily matter as rippling pink oceans. Not toned, smooth skin – but real, wobbly mass. Jenny Saville, the one-time YBA, paints flesh much like those greats, but this show of immense new works multiplies and twists everything so that flesh melts into abstract brush strokes and body parts morph and evaporate.
In the most recognisably Saville-esque paintings here, groups of sitters are posed with their bodies intertwined. In ‘Olympia’ (2013-14), a grumpy faced model stares away listlessly in the arms of a lover. There’s a multitude of body parts to her – three arms, four legs, four boobs – and Saville’s brush drags her flesh all over the canvas. It’s hasty, twisted, indecisive work, and that’s a good thing.
In other paintings, Saville’s incredible technical skill shines through, with faces rendered with photo-realistic precision. It often feels like these are Polaroids that have been left to melt in the sun. The faces get lost in a haze of gestures, often barely peeking through.
But it’s when the faces disappear almost completely that Saville draws you in the most. Broad, Picasso-like strokes of charcoal are sketched on intense red and blue in ‘Oxyrhynchus’ and over gun-metal grey in ‘In the Realms of the Mother III’. Your eyes have to piece together the visual clues to understand that these too are bodies. They’re almost completely abstract works, with Saville near enough totally discarding precision in favour of rough intensity. That they feel somehow fleshier than the figurative paintings is proof of how good Saville really is.
Eddy Frankel