IT

Charcoal portraits of fragmented bodies challenged the gaze in the Venetian venue of Victoria Miro Gallery, which hosted Saskia Colwell’s solo exhibition until 15 March 2025.

Skin on Skin is the title of the solo show by painter Saskia Colwell (b.1999,London), that opened on the first of February 2025, in the Venetian spaces of the Victoria Miro Gallery. Uponentering, the semi darkness embraced the viewer and directed the gaze towards the only illuminated spots in the room: the nine works from a series started by the artist during her residency in Venice in May 2024 and later completed in her London studio. The clinical precision in the arrangement of the works on the walls and the gallery’s mini malist setting echoed the figurative perfection of bodyparts, often intimate and explicit, that the artist compelsus to look at. But compulsion turns into pleasure through Colwell’s drawings: a voyeuristic yet modest pleasure of those who know they are looking at the “forbidden.” The dense darkness of the black backgrounds frames the whiteness of marble-like bodies caught in moments of plastic contortion and unnatural poses, that destabilize and seduce. These portraits are in an ambiguous position between the scientific clarity of photography and a surprising statuesque, almost “Michelangeloesque” three dimensionality. This effectis made possible by the technique Colwell uses to press charcoal onto vellum, which replaces the more common linen or paper: “skin on skin, as the artist describe s it. This organic surface, once alive and now dead, adds further layers and depth to her works.

SASKIA COLWELL’S EXHIBITION IN VENICE

In Turning the other Cheek, the chiaroscuro of the anatomical hollows, the folds of the skin, the softness of the flesh, and the perfect curve of the twisting spine, all coming together to “offer the other cheek (or rather, the other buttock), enhance the image, inviting us not only to look closer, but to look deeper, unveiling an already unveiled body, to touch it, to live it. Through the exaggerated and isolated rendering of her own body, abstracted enough to become ours as well, the artist invites viewers to experience and reconnect with their own bodies in an active process ofself awareness. But it is in portraits like Praise the Lord that Colwell’s political and provocative intentions become most evident: two feet symmetrically touch each other like praying hands, but the figure being addressed is not the Lord, it’s a vulva. The open groin reveals a blooming of clitoral flesh, that emerges like a flower from a field of pubic hair. With this image, Colwell subtly desecrates the sacred and transforms the obscene into the erotic. It becomes a political act of reclamation, placing at center stage the “obscene”, the erogenous zones of the female body, censored for centuries by decency laws.

THE WORKS BY SASKIA COLWELL AT VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY

But if it’s true that today a glut of pornographic images makes everything easily visible and consumable, it’s also true that many other images are banned by algorithms that decide what can and cannot be shown, what is appropriate and what is not, a robotic process that often becomes uncritical censorship, suffered by the artist herself on social platforms like Instagram. In response to this heteropatriarchal control policy embedded in AI, Saskia Colwell creates deceptive visions of the female body, sometimes inserting orifices where they should not be, or not showing them where they are, disrupting the system. She creates a glitch that fools the algorithm, making it unable to categorize her work as human anatomy. In doing so, she escapes AI’s control over the female body and exposes its effects on the exploration of sexuality. The nine works on display occupy the liminal space between private and public, intimate and distant, lawful and illicit, delicate and raw, classical and contemporary. They offer controversial visions that both attract and repel. The artist invites us to question the ethical and political implications of looking, even in spaces designated for looking like galleries and museums, which Colwell, in another subversive gesture, transforms into places of exploration of so – called “illicit” pleasure.

Vittoria Morpurgo   

https://www.victoria-miro.com/

Translated with AI