The blind leading the visionary

Artist Mat Collishaw, whose recent work goes on show this week, is on a quest to find meaning in our increasingly chaotic world. Simon Grant met him

Monday, 24 April 2000

Mat Collishaw always gets lumped in with the YBA crowd. He went to Goldsmiths, is around the same age (40), but hasn't had a solo show in a public space in this country for five years. This is bizarre, considering that he is one of the most challenging and thought-provoking artists of his generation. It might have something to do with the nature of his work. It is not confessional, in-yer-face, headline grabbing stuff. Neither is its scale attractive to collectors like Saatchi. He makes video and photography, often displayed in claustrophobic environments like glass domes, that have morbid or unsettling undertones.

Mat Collishaw always gets lumped in with the YBA crowd. He went to Goldsmiths, is around the same age (40), but hasn't had a solo show in a public space in this country for five years. This is bizarre, considering that he is one of the most challenging and thought-provoking artists of his generation. It might have something to do with the nature of his work. It is not confessional, in-yer-face, headline grabbing stuff. Neither is its scale attractive to collectors like Saatchi. He makes video and photography, often displayed in claustrophobic environments like glass domes, that have morbid or unsettling undertones.

Collishaw's latest works - all of which take iconic paintings as their starting point - go on show this week as part of a group exhibition staged by the Lisson Gallery in a former industrial building in Covent Garden. Among them is the extraordinary video piece called Blind Date for which he took a 36-hour trip to Madrid to see Velazquez's Las Meninas - but blindfolded for the whole journey. Only when he arrived in front the picture did the blindfold come off. He looked at the picture for a few minutes, then the blindfold was put back on and he went back to London. Why? "I am fascinated by the game in which pictures can lead you into a whole world of desire," he says. "They have that kind of power over me. It is like being unable to deal with the real thing. I feel a kind of crisis, an anxiety, that you can't appreciate the real thing enough. It is the same experience with the "Mona Lisa". It is so used up as an image. You can't look at it any more. It is a disappointment. The inability for the picture to deliver what they promise is exciting. The desire is stimulated but you are left unsatisfied. In Blind Date by blindfolding myself I wanted to eliminate the periphery, to see the purity of the painting, even try to see it without the frame, just the painting."

It is a neat piece, but it highlights some interesting fears that the contemporary artist, not just Collishaw, has to deal with. Collishaw admits this piece is rooted in his preference for the "simplicity" of looking at reproductions in magazines. He prefers the representations of reality to the real thing, largely because he clearly feels threatened, confused and overwhelmed by being bombarded by images from all sides. Blind Date functions as a kind of test, to see whether he can shut out all these external influences, and enjoy the art for what it is. It is a common feeling. Are we not overwhelmed by the sheer weight of history as we wander around the National Gallery? In this context it is easy to see why certain art historians find rational picture interpretation such a cosy way of dealing with the enormity of emotion at work. Collishaw certainly feels vulnerable to this kind of overload, and his recent work seems to be a way of channelling all that unpredictable stuff, so much so that he makes sure he has little control. "In Blind Date, you are powerless in a way," he says. "It is like being held hostage, kidnapped by a picture."

Collishaw talks about anxiety and desire a lot, which could have something to do with his upbringing. He was brought up as a Christadelphian, a strict Protestant sect that dates back to Victorian times. They take the bible literally. For a young Mat growing up in Nottingham, this meant prayer meetings three times a week, no telly, and more terrible, no Christmas.

While he keen to stress that he "loves his parents" he says that it has had an effect on him. "I was brought up to believe in a kingdom of God, another world that, if we struggle, is attainable, and this world is merely a test. I used to believe that. But when you grow older you discover that certain things just don't add up."

Could it be that Collishaw's release from this strict repressive upbringing has led to a form of release that has is scared he can't control? Certainly it comes across that one side of him wants to indulge in excess, while another wants to be held in check. What it has given him is an overview of the world around him. Collishaw excels among his peers in his ability to put all this media imagery and cultural fluff to good use, rather than just hold up a mirror. He is good at questioning the problems of the here and now, what it is like to be an artist working, as he puts it, "in a decadent era, where we live with the death of the humanitarian dream". One video work in the forthcoming show hints at this. We see Collishaw on the toilet. There is an indiscriminate brown shape. The camera moves closer and reveals the outlines of Duccio's altarpiece of Madonna and Child. It is his comment, about how contemporary Catholic culture, amongst others, can see divinity in the crummiest of environments, that faith does have to be stuck in ancient symbolism. But it is also a kind of frustrated self-portrait, a self-reflective dig at his anxiety of seeing meaning in every image around him. Despite the scatology of this work, there is a sense of optimism. Despite the chaos, he feels it is worth trying. "No other species uses imagery like we do, to pass ideas around, to play games. It is a beautiful thing to be able to communicate like that. It leads you down all sorts of blind alleys and confusing labyrinths, but it is an entertaining journey."

Big really does mean beautiful

Jenny Saville talks to Charles Darwent about her giant nudes

Monday, 17 April 2000

There's a lot to look at in Jenny Saville's new painting, Fulcrum, on show at the Saatchi Gallery's exhibition "Ant Noises". For one thing, Fulcrum is the kind of billboard-sized work that cruel critics maintain appeals to Charles Saatchi's ad-man's eye. At five metres by three, it is about bigness. Which is fair, given that the picture's subject is a trio of enormously fat women, tied together naked on what looks like a mortuary slab. Vast breasts shear across the canvas like tectonic plates, an effect made more powerful by Saville's planar brushwork. Her palette - a mottling foxblood, cellulite yellows and subaqueous blues - suggests dead meat. At Fulcrum's centre, the thighs of the two lower women lock like clasped fingers. So dense is the painting that the figures become a single, illegible mass: a cumulo-nimbus of flesh that floats out at you with that lightness-on-its-feet of the very fat.

There's a lot to look at in Jenny Saville's new painting, Fulcrum, on show at the Saatchi Gallery's exhibition "Ant Noises". For one thing, Fulcrum is the kind of billboard-sized work that cruel critics maintain appeals to Charles Saatchi's ad-man's eye. At five metres by three, it is about bigness. Which is fair, given that the picture's subject is a trio of enormously fat women, tied together naked on what looks like a mortuary slab. Vast breasts shear across the canvas like tectonic plates, an effect made more powerful by Saville's planar brushwork. Her palette - a mottling foxblood, cellulite yellows and subaqueous blues - suggests dead meat. At Fulcrum's centre, the thighs of the two lower women lock like clasped fingers. So dense is the painting that the figures become a single, illegible mass: a cumulo-nimbus of flesh that floats out at you with that lightness-on-its-feet of the very fat.

And it is beautiful. The thing that strikes you about Fulcrum is its delicacy, that same perverse juggling with massiveness that allows you to see a two-ton Richard Serra as fragile or a wall-sized Rothko as frail. On the one hand, the painting's construction makes you worried that it is about to collapse under its own weight, thundering out of the picture-space in an avalanche of avoirdupois. Saville, who appears as the top figure in the picture, says that she had to paint it from polaroids because "you just can't ask people to lie on top of each other like that for long." There are delicacies in Fulcrum's narrative as well. A mother and daughter feature: "The mother's sixty and they'd never seen each other naked before," says Saville.

But is the picture intentionally grotesque? Had Fulcrum been painted by Lucian Freud - comparisons of the two artists' styles are made more frequently than Saville likes - you would have felt that its premise was unkind. As it is, Saville has placed her subjects in a pose that is plainly painful on account of their weight, tied them together with ligatures that cut into their arms and splattered them with a clotted red pigment that reads ambiguously as either shadow or blood. The echo is less of Freud than of Francis Bacon, humanity on the butcher's hook.

Saville's answer is uncompromising. "I don't think Bacon pushed it as far as he could have done," she says, drawing on the compulsory Britpack Marlboro. "His mark-making retained an interest in the subject, that's what gave it its charge. I want a different pivot: areas of painting where you lose yourself and only see what they are when you step back."

So there are more pivots at work in Fulcrum than meet the eye. Saville admits that she is fascinated by "bodies that are extreme, bodies that are transgressive, narrative.

"You see someone really huge and you think, 'heart attack'," she says. "You see a pregnant woman and you think, 'life'." Her taste for fat lies in its story of change. So huge is Fulcrum's canvas, so mountainous the figures on it, that they can't be taken in in a single glance. "To read it, your eye has to move across it, like a landscape", says Saville.

Bound up in this is a double self-portrait, of Saville as both feminist and painter. The idea of the female body as a landscape of sexual sites (as opposed to the phallocentricism of the male) owes itself to the writings of Luce Irigaray and Seventies Ecriture Féminin. The oddness of Saville's bodies forces you to see them as a narrative in time. Best of all, Saville likes plastic surgery. "When the surgeons talk about moving flesh - donor sites, mattresses - it's a recipe for how to paint. I sometimes feel I have this tin of liquid flesh in my studio, and that surgery manuals are kind of how-to-do books."

Which makes the title of one of her other works in the show, Ruben's Flap, intriguing. Critics have seen it as a reference to Saville's feminist repossession of the female nude, a quick jab at Rubens and his phallus-bearing kind. It is actually a clinical term for the incision made in a thigh before a skin-graft. What this suggests is a movement away from Irigaray towards a more visceral understanding of painting. Saville's blood-splashes, her hills of flesh, don't just tell the story of her subjects: they also tell her own. "People say my work is less feminist," muses Saville, in front of another new work, called Hyphen. "I don't know. I do know that I can pinpoint the moment I made this or that particular mark, how it tied the surface down, whether it was a nightmare day or not. I'm a lot more open to paint now, it really used to freak me out. I've got this suspicion that painting's kind of over, but I like it too much to stop doing it."

'Ant Noises', Saatchi Gallery, NW8 (020 7328 8299), from Thursday to 20 August