The bodybuilder: in the brazen bodies of Jenny Saville, violence and bliss are mixed

This entry is posted on number 36 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until September 2, 2025

The wonderful brutality of the body. So one could summarize one of the paintings of Jenny Saville (London, National Portrait Gallery, until 7/09). His painting starts from the academic beauty of classical art, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rembrandt, to take three random disfigures, and becomes a tour de force of human meat, mainly the female one, but also male and childish.

In an era like ours, obsessed with the maintenance and mutation of our bodies, Saville’s is a hidden art artwithout too many compliments towards correctness, but also without ruffling to brazen statements.

On the other hand His subjects are brazen, where violence and bliss mix and come out of each other. Jenny Saville uses the brush like a Machete, while in the drawings it seems that you use a needle, producing images of a catastrophic lightness like the two children victims of the bombings in Syria in 2016, where small bodies are already anime, tragically current.

To the absurdity of violence and death, the artist opposes the mystery of life in a motherhood built with the body of an pregnant black woman and an African mask, mixing the magical belly of the woman with the idol of fertility. Creation and creativity, art at the service of humanity and its bodyIdentity container and insecurity, vanity and shame, attraction and repulsion.

If one of his predecessors, the always English painter Lucian Freud, forced the bodies to become painting, Jenny Saville forces painting to turn into body and spiritfreeing his subjects from the weight of the meat. An artist who, can be said, experiences art on his own skin.

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