Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews Jenny Saville at the Saatchi

Perched on a high stool, a large woman kneads her thighs and looks down her nose with an inscrutable expression that could be distress or lust. She is wearing a pair of white shoes and nothing else. Having been painted from a photograph taken through a fish-eye lens, she is accordingly distorted and her knees, faceted by light and by the slightly broken handling of the artist, look bruised and enormous. A text, scratched into the paint in mirror writing, runs across and down her body: ''If we continue to speak in this sameness - speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other again . . .''
 
Jenny Saville's Propped is a picture of a naked woman bulked out with references to fine art as well as to literature. The woman on a stool is a Rubens nude politically corrected: taught sad self-consciousness, made to realise that fat is a feminist issue. Heavy-handed, she exists to make a point.
 
Saville's pictures, seven of which are currently displayed within the hangar of the Saatchi Gallery, are evidently intended to disconcert. Like striking photographs, they reproduce singularly well, and that fact combined with their perennially topical subject matter and Charles Saatchi's well-advertised patronage has made Saville, temporarily at least, Britain's Most Talked About Young Artist. Vast paintings of vast female bodies, Saville's works are nakedly confrontational, images of women whose fatness is a source of formidability. A triptych of pictures of the same large woman seen, in her underwear, from different angles, may or may not allude to Van Dyck's well known triple portrait of Charles I. Saville's title, Strategy (South Face / Front Face / North Face), insists on the dumb mountainous quality of her semi-nude subject:...

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