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| Juncture by Jenny Saville |
Jenny Saville
Under the skinJenny Saville's paintings are known for the mountains of flesh they reveal, but it is the neuroses bursting through that interest her, she tells Suzie Mackenzie
Suzie Mackenzie
Saturday 22 October 2005 00.13 BST
In August 2003, on her way back to London from a holiday in Sicily, the artist Jenny Saville stopped off in the island's capital, Palermo, for what she intended to be a single day's sightseeing, having never visited the city before. It must have been like entering not so much a new world, as her own world - the world she has carried around in her head since she was a child and which she has forged into those monumental flesh paintings, her unidealised naked bodies, which erupt and leak at us, and force us into new habits of perception. What is this thing, the body, her paintings ask, when it is stripped bare, denuded of personality and context, this thing that seems so much a part of us, and which we try so hard to look after and yet which betrays us, decays from within, and which, when it leaves us, takes us with it?
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| Trace, 1993 by Jenny Saville |
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alermo, she says, seemed to her just like a vast mutant body, a body that doesn't belong to anyone or to any one moment in time. "A mysterious hybrid of a city. Here you see can see a 1950s public housing building abutting a Norman church. An Arab mosque next to a Catholic church." And, just like the body, it bears the scars of all its violent and tumultuous history.
