A Particular Gravity
Jenny Saville returns to Paris with Latent, a solo exhibition at Gagosian’s 1st arrondissement space with a series of new paintings. Situated between the famed Tuilerie Gardens and and Rue St. Honoré, Saville fills the historic quarter with a blitz of vibrant color and energy, wrapped up in new paintings that are at once self-reflective and engage in a long-running historical dialogue of portrayal of the human form.
The term Latent can be understood in two ways; either as something hidden or concealed, or something not yet manifested. In the case of Saville’s subjects, oftentimes women who have undergone immense trauma and seek to regain agency, this differing
With abstract painting, the viewer often looks for recognizable images. With paintings of the human form, the viewer imparts their own identity on the subject. Thus in the eponymous painting Latent, a portrait of a woman from the collarbone up, while the emotions on the sitter’s face run from pain, sorow and dismay, depending on the viewer, the also read resilience, perseverance and the reclamation of agency. Is the sitter’s agency hidden, or yet to reveal itself?
The piece is undoubtedly Saville, the figure’s skin portrayed in fleshy tones and with brown accents reminiscent of bruises. Yet like much of Saville’s recent work, the palette is rich and vibrant. The figure rests atop of a glowing red backdrop, accented by gestural marks in red and blue.
These same marks appear, this time in a greater frenzy in the canvas of a nude, Fugue. Rendered in watercolor, pastel and charcoal on canvas, thick wavy lines obscure a woman’s body, seemingly emanating from the figure herself. The body appears in repose but not quite at ease, and the face is left unfinished in charcoal.
Saville paints her subjects with a particular gravity, or perhaps lack thereof. Often photographing herself lying in the tub or on the ground and painting from these models, Saville draws inspiration from the way flesh naturally sits, and how the light and shadows get lost in the twists, turns and folds on the human form.
In Latent, Saville plays with irrational gesture and illusionistic control. Her nudes and portraits exist in a world that borders the real and the absurd. Her integration of abstract expressionist techniques in her figurative works seek to portray the human form across various states in a single setting. Multiple realities take pictorial form in a single image, as abstract layers build upon one another in Saville’s latent space, culminating in another knockout exhibition that ponders the deep relationship between self, humanity, and the nature of painting itself.