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• 1 media/Screen Shot 2020-10-15 at 8.02.20 PM.png 2020-10-14T22:03:48+00:00 Jenny Saville: Contemporary Bodies 15 by Even Johnson image_header 2020-12-13T05:45:13+00:00      Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter from Cambridge born in 1970. She is known for her large-scale depictions of the nude human form. What makes her nudes so unique are the subjects she chooses to paint and how she paints them. Saville is fascinated by flesh. In an interview with Channel 4 News, she explained, “I’ve always been interested in the body or the way bodies move. The human body, it’s what we are isn’t it?” Flesh pushed up against glass, pregnant women, obese women, dead bodies, carcasses of meat… these are the subjects of Saville’s paintings.Two of her works I found particularly compelling were her nude portraits of a trans man and a trans woman. Even today, non-sexual nude representations of transgender people are few and far between. Saville’s specific style blend of what seems to be classical figuration and modern abstraction lends to her desire to portray bodies as they are: imperfect, malleable masses of flesh that cannot be confined to society’s narrow perceptions of the human form.
  
  In 1999, Saville painted a large-scale nude portrait of Del LaGrace Volcano, a transman who was born intersex and raised as a female. The painting shows LaGrace lying supine on the edge of some unidentifiable furniture with his legs spread and what is unmistakably a vagina in full view. His head, with obvious facial hair, is raised and peers at the viewer over his breasts which are flopped towards the left, giving a clear sense of gravity and weight to them. One of the most important aspects of this painting that can’t be accurately expressed in an essay format is how huge it is. Matrix is about 7 ft x 10 ft, making it as tall as André the Giant and twice as long as Danny DeVito laying down. The effect this has, is that this painting is demanding to be seen. Saville has expressed in the past that she intends her paintings, “…to confront you and to exist…” As vulnerable as LaGrace’s position is, there’s very little about it that’s sexual. Usually when transgender people are represented in any form of art or media, they’re fetishized and treated as sexual objects. In Saville’s portrait, the body may be the focus of the painting, but it’s LaGrace’s eye contact and how the viewer is looking up at this giant body that makes one feel LaGrace is not to be desired, but to be seen.
  
       There’s a palpable sense of in betweenness Saville shows in both subject matter and her painting methodology of Matrix. LaGrace is both intersex and transgender, someone who exists physically and mentally between the gender binary. Saville’s unique style of painting really lends 
  itself to exploring this theme. Critics describe her work as being a combination of figuration and abstraction. It’s obvious that what she’s painting is a person, yet the way she uses color and texture does not suggest this is an entirely accurate depiction of external reality. Saville seems more interested in how you see something rather that what you see. Her paintings aren’t very blended, and her use of blocky, angular strokes gives them this raw, unfinished look. To Saville, the human body isn’t soft and perfect as it’s constantly portrayed in media to be,
  “[Flesh] is all things. Ugly, beautiful, repulsive, compelling, anxious, neurotic, dead, alive.” This outlook especially applies to trans people whose bodies can look nothing like what society has collectively agreed the male and female nude form should look like. The word matrix comes from the latin word mater which means “mother”, later coming to mean “womb”. Appropriate considering one of the general definitions for matrix is an environment or material in which something develops or originates. In titling her portrait of LaGrace, Matrix, I believe Saville 
  meant to call attention to the fact that not only cis women possess wombs. Society tends to place heavy importance on genitalia being the backbone of your identity, yet here we are confronted with someone who refuses to let that define them. The human body may be what we are but it’s not who we are.
  
       There’s a question that continues to be debated by every sect of the art community: can, and should, art be separated from the artist?

  Interviewer: A lot of people took a political meaning out of 
  your work with bodies and women’s bodies particularly. Were 
  they wrong to do that or they can take what they like out of it?
  
  Saville: People can take what they like, I mean- Sometimes it’s 
  a little annoying to say it’s just about “female issues”, because I 
  don’t feel like that at all. The debate that’s going on in myself 
  about making [the Erota exhibition] is about memory and time 
  and is it possible that you can look at one body and see another 
  body through it? So, it’s almost like your pivot between one 
  perception and another. That doesn’t have anything to do with 
  necessarily being in a female body. 
   
   
  - Jenny Saville on Channel 4 News

  Focusing solely on Jenny Saville and her paintings, I find her identity to be a simultaneously integral yet unimportant part of analyzing her works. It is important to know who created the work in question as it can answer questions as to why it looks the way it does. However, this type of analysis can cloud the viewer from seeing the work beyond who created it. By knowing who made something, it’s always going to add some level of implicit bias that affects the viewer’s judgment. Critics often generalize Saville’s pieces as “feminist paintings” because she’s a woman who paints nude portraits of (mainly) women with diverse body types. Saville herself does agree that her work comes from a feminist perspective, but she doesn’t like to put herself into a box.The fact of the matter is, depending on which of Saville’s paintings you’re looking at, her identity is going to have varying degrees of importance. 
  
       One of her paintings I find identity to be extremely high on the importance spectrum is The Mothers (2011). Saville has painted her post-pregnancy self, holding her two children. It’s an intimate look into her experience with pregnancy and motherhood. In this case, the painting is literally her identity. With a portrait like Matrix, bringing her identity into a critical analysis of this work doesn’t lend much insight. Matrix is about showing the world that trans bodies exist and are made up of the same flesh everyone else lives in. Bringing Saville’s identity into it makes it about her and what she believes. Analyzing it from this perspective isn’twrong per se, but I think it misses the point. Rather than looking at the painting and confronting your own feelings about the existence of trans people, you’re thinking about Saville and deflecting your judgements onto her.
  
       Through her distinctive art style, Saville shows us that the human form is more than what we see in magazines and movies. Flesh is fascinating and the flaws, imperfections, and stories in the skin culminate together to make a work of art that speaks for itself. In every person, but transgender and intersex people especially, there's a narrative that reminds us that our unique bodies are integral to our identity- but aren't the defining factor. Saville masterfully shows this in Matrix (1999), using figuration and abstraction to represent the blending of gender identity and sex in its most raw form. This is told not through Saville's experience. Instead, it's told through the skin of a transgender intersex man, whose very body is in defiance of what we as a society hold as law and challenges us to push beyond our physicality to reach our truest selves.