Drawing : Layers of relationships, intimacy and circumstance

Outpost 070324

Speculative Haptic Experimentation.

Oxyrhynchus.

Jenny Saville.

John Elderfield. 2015

Several new works are inspired by the ancient Egyptian rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, one of the most important archaeological sites ever discovered. Heaps of discarded documents and literature; fragments incredibly preserved are now invaluable. Greek texts as Euclid's Elements and the poems of Sappho are among the excavated papyri.

Saville alludes to this history through a deep layering of paired subjects, faces, torsos, and limbs overlap with shadows and reflections creating palimpsests of living bodies and ancestral apparitions. Silhouettes drawn in charcoal through the surfaces of oil paint underscore the motion of the central embracing figures, while evoking the timeless process of sketching.

Time, figures, and carnality is further compressed by Saville's adaptation of various historical approaches to portraiture. From De Kooning's fluid abstractions of the female figure, to the almost combined couples of Picasso's late paintings and Japanese Shunga prints.

These intermediate studies echo the shifting status of the unearthed papers, once discarded now treasured. The depth and density of things now excavated from their surroundings are now brought into thinner layers of relationships, intimacy and circumstance. Saville's own figures merge ethereally with settings that have been loosely appropriated from photographs and evoke the backdrops of Renaissance Paintings.

 

The Human Clay.

The School of London

On Drawing, John Berger.

Michael Grimshaw.

40 Drawings 1968-1995

Drawing is the architecture of the spirit.

The drawings in this exhibition track a progression, both chronologically and through shifts of language. Inevitably there are tangents and seductions.

The more I draw the more I discover that drawing is really an echo of our being. Its sound, its voice is beyond ideas and runs all reason ragged.

I was interested in drawing 'ordinariness' because nothing seemed more interesting or as magical. This feeling is still no less dull than it was then.

The dense, mysterious spaces and shapes of her paisley dress terrified me and her shifting, speaking head was so impossible to understand as I sat in front of her on the carpet in an urgent and perplexed state. I struggled to make sense of what I saw and felt. These drawings often drew laughter from my mother and father but, in spite of their gentle mockery, I sensed that somewhere buried ion this activity of drawing there lay a wondrous elemental power.

When I look and see an ink drawing of Tobias by Rembrandt, a stubbed pencil remark of Martha lying in the bath by Pierre Bonnard or, say, a cigarette smoking hand by Philip Guston, then clearly, beyond ideas, it is the vision, the coming closer, that really matters.

Today this mysterious quality remains as primal and as tantalising as it did then. My own conceit, the facade and crude consciousness of ideas cannot undo the profound igniting and unconscious power of drawing.