Jenny Saville- I have been admiring her paintings ever since you showed one of them in class. I look at them almost every day. They are really exciting, beautifully made, hard to look at, but you can't stop looking at them. I'm not sure what motivates her to paint these. My initial interpretation is that they are dealing with violence against women,the human body as object, plastic surgery, images of beauty that we push on each other, etc. But I don't know, maybe they are about much more.
If they are trying to make a moral point, or to make us more conscious of this kind of physical and psychological violence (violence that I think is very real and should be exposed for what it is)
then there is something that disturbs me about how attractive she has made the surface of these paintings. Oil paint is beautiful when it is mastered by an artist, when you can see all the little blobs of goo individually, but at the same time see how they are orchestrated into a living human form that exists in light. It is a beautiful trick. It's luxurious. I'm afraid that it might make these images attractive on a deeper level, past the point where they have a critical or consciousness raising function. These works have obviously really moved me and made me think. I feel like when we start dealing with these kinds of issues, I stop caring about art. We should just motivate people to do something to change their world, and stop drooling over luxurious oil paintings so much.