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 fragments, then, on these portions of bodies that offer themselves to view, and through which the very distinction between within and without is unsettled, beings that are not persons, yet bear nonetheless an anthropomorphic resonance.
Synecdoches: remnants, shards, segments of flesh that stand in for the whole body; parts that assume the burden of the totality, that act in its stead.
Drawings that are sculptures yet wrought in skin.
There is no interior. Nothing lies beneath. What they exhibit as exterior is as though an inside turned outward: surface assuming the office of depth.
No self, no hidden treasure of intimacy, no confession of subjectivity. And yet more than this: the Body, the ephemeral Self, stage the relation to the world of something that exists wholly in skin, fully exposed, encompassing us by filling the entire field of presence.
These fragments of bodies hang within a void they seem to absorb, a void that recedes with them. What lingers is the strange and familiar sensation of a presence without name, without face, moving as dream-images move: neither fully here nor altogether elsewhere.
A body outside itself, uttering no signification. Each time, an ostentum: that which appears and seizes the gaze, drawing it into itself, where surface and profundity are indistinguishable.
The drawing is itself a skin. Here it is doubled by what it depicts: skin adhered to the skin of the drawing. A troubling indistinction arises, between skin, image, and body.
An incarnation through the exterior, once more. We are where our skin meets the world: at the surface, flayed, without contour or frontier.
Openings at the margins through which the body is carried off or perhaps from which it first emerged.
Something vanishes in the very act of appearing or else appears in the instant of its disappearance.
An anatomy displayed upon an exposed, at times overexposed, surface, like a photograph saturated with light. These skins hang, yet they absorb their own gravity; they do not weigh down so much as hover.
The nakedness of torn fragments restores to them a paradoxical unity.
Naked, the body does not know itself; it signifies in reverse, faceless, turned back upon meaning.
The skin assumes the role of the face: it presents itself , offered without appeal, to be accepted or refused.
The impersonal and identity blur into one another. Nothing is recounted. These resemble portraits of presences that have outstripped the condition of portraiture.
Cuirasses, spectres, suspended doubles of bodies; garments emancipated into autonomous beings. A strange phantasmagoria of skin-images unfolds, forms that have slipped the tether of their bearer.
No sex and yet sex gleams in and through its very absence from all that is shown. It does not gesture toward relation. It stands instead as the sheer presence of what precedes us, of that anteriority that does not originate in us. It marks the “before” that is not our own.
A memento of flesh.
P erhaps above all , one might also insist upon the apotropaic force of these “image-sculptures.” They bear something of the Medusan countenance: they ward off calamity, they shield and protect or they invoke the very fate they hold at bay.
