About
Saskia Van Rooijen
Saskia van Rooijen explores, through drawing, the body and the limits of its representation at the point where flesh becomes flesh or chimera.
Drawing to question the fabric of reality between presence and absence.
Memento of Flesh
Alain Chareyre-Mejan
A look at...
A few snippets about these body parts that are shown and with which the inside and outside of beings that are not persons but which nevertheless have an anthropomorphic dimension are called into question.
Synecdoches, the remains, bits, pieces of the body which stand for the whole body, parts which stand for the whole or which take its place.
Drawings that are sculptures... but made of skin.
There is nothing inside, only the outside they exhibit is like an inside turned inside out: the surface takes the place of depth.
No self, no intimate riches, no expression of subjectivity. But better and more than that: The Body, the ephemeral Self, presents the relationship to the world of something that is there fully, skin deep, surrounding us with a world that occupies all the space.
These body parts hang in a void that they absorb and that disappears with them. What remains is the strange and familiar feeling of a nameless and faceless presence that plays out like the images in a dream.
"This is my body": A body outside of itself, which does not convey a meaning. It is always an "ostentum": something that appears and carries the gaze with it, surface and depth merging.
The drawing itself is a skin. Here, it is doubled by what it presents: skin stuck to the skin of the drawing. Confusion then arises between the skin, the drawing, and the body.
An embodiment through the outside, once again. We are where our skin meets the world, on the surface, flayed, without edges.
Holes on the edges through which the body is carried - unless it comes from there.
Something disappears in its appearance - or appears in its disappearance.
Anatomy of a body on an exposed, sometimes overexposed, surface, like a photograph that has captured the light. The skin hangs, but it absorbs its gravity: it floats, rather.
The nakedness of the body's fragments, which restores their unity.
Naked, the body does not know itself; it is a meaning in reverse, without a face.
The skin serves as the face: it's presented as such, take it or leave it.
The impersonal and the personal become one. Nothing is narrated. They are like portraits of presences that have transcended the stage of portraiture.
Armor, phantoms, suspended body doubles, clothes that have become independent beings. There is a kind of fantastical quality to these skin-images that have become autonomous.
No sex—and yet sex shines in and through its absence in everything we see. But it doesn't refer to the order of a relationship. It is the presence, left to itself, of what precedes us. It signals this "before that does not come from us."
A memento of flesh.
We could also, and perhaps first of all, emphasize the apotropaic dimension of these "image-sculptures": they have a Medusa head aspect, they ward off the fatal and are protective or they call it forth.
