Jenny Saville

Anyone familiar with contemporary figurative painting knows the formidable work of Jenny Saville. For the past thirty years, beginning as a peripheral YBA, she has steadily climbed the ladder of contemporary art stardom to sit somewhere near its pinnacle. She emerged through the collector, Charles Saatchi, in the early 90’s with a gift for figurative realism, somewhat in the style of Lucian Freud and from there expanded her range to documentation of Bacon-esque deformation of the human head, either through injury or because of plastic surgery. The wounds and disfigurement along with corporeal bodies announced her consummate mastery of painterly realism on a scale that took on the big boys of painting. But it’s the taking on of the big boys that has planted the seeds of doubt in this writer’s mind.

I’ve already named two big boys, Bacon and Freud. They were formative influences and for a young painter just finding her voice, wholly expected. In her recent work she has obviously been watching the strategies and methods of Abstract Expressionism, De Kooning in particular. Her building up of flesh has taken on greater gestural authority over a lengthy period. The substance of paint itself, a stand -n for flesh or even by transubstantiation flesh itself. At least this is a noted aim of Saville’s. Her scale has remained enormous which flirts with the problem of overblown importance. The grand scale, ubiquitous in contemporary art brings up art as spectacle and worse, entertainment. Extremely large scale announces ahead of time its importance. The viewer is robbed of her own sense of discovery. It’s as if the painting tells you what to think before you draw your own conclusions. Since Pollock et al. introduced the painting as mural, this sort of scale has become an issue people accept and avoid at the same time.

With scale, authoritative facture, unimpeachable skill, and shock firmly established tools of her trade Saville has in the last decade aligned her practice with the titans of painting. This not only includes those already mentioned but the Old Masters and the explicit introduction of abstract gestural painting. This new stage exposes her work to new criteria and reassessment. It’s one thing to paint heroic figures in a de Kooning manner in a spirit of irony and as a possible feminist stance, but then the introduction of Old Master composition and technique opens the work to another level of fragile exposure.

The recent paintings are more obvious in their construction. She begins with a frenzy of abstract gestural tropes and then superimposes her trademark realism over the top being careful to leave strategically placed passages of the underlying abstraction. The ploy has become a series of quotations rather than the unified statement of her earlier work. Maybe she tired of the body as site for disruption by elective surgery which provided her with a subject and the topical content of women under societal pressure to conform to the male gaze. Now her work has in some ways become purely formalist. She’s interested in how paint behaves, how style performs; if I fuse one style with another will my scale be justified, can I make tradition and modernism work together.

These recent quotations announce importance because work as pre-emptive strategies in the same way scale does. Out of One, a pastiche of old master draughtmanship, pentimenti, coupled with Abstract Expressionist calligraphy, evident in her recent large-scale drawings, compounds her vulnerability as an artist losing her grip on what she has been very good at, using her unquestioned ability with paint to honestly and sincerely state her truth as a painter. Now she’s wandered into a post-modern maze where she is quoting all the important influences, in this case, Twombly-esque scribbling, doing a mash-up to evoke a grand unified statement. The results while superficially impressive, can appear hollow. It’s a terrain that has been cushioned by the comforting knowledge that quoting old masters such as Leonardo protect the work from scrutiny by its association. All risk is diminished and the danger is a dull safety pervades the work leaving its pallor of mastery a pale diaphanous veil.

I have no doubt of Saville’s sincerity. It might be said her development echoes that of any number of highly successful artists of the last forty-five years. The art market itself, its hype, its wealth are contributing factors to the rise of reputations often ill-equipped to deal with  extreme pressures of investment and commercial gain. Saville appears to have her head firmly on her shoulders but has strayed somewhat to feed the discourse. This pressure to present something new, while understandable, can tempt an artist into territory not their own. Saville is better when she addresses her concerns. It is always dangerous to embrace fashionable strategies and theories belonging to others. It can easily slip into a pose. Saville is better than that.