Saskia Colwell’s playful drawings resemble marble sculptures

An arched torso bows towards us from a slender, arrow-slit-sized canvas: the planetary outlines of breasts, taut white skin, the inner press of a belly button, down to the clam-like fray of labial lips. Imperfect Symmetry by London-based artist Saskia Colwell is one in a series of drawings that make up ‘Skin on Skin’, her solo exhibition at Victoria Miro, Venice.

The show’s title is a reference to the artworks' material (charcoal on vellum (animal skin) which has been stretched over board) and subject matter: Colwell’s own body, first photographed and then abstracted through the mark-marking process to variously resemble marble sculpture, anatomical drawings, retro erotic photography. Imperfect Symmetry is among the most explicit images: full frontal, viewed from below, a perspective that in another context might be considered pornographic. Yet the segmentation of the body, floating within black space, has a clinical rather than alluring effect. Colwell seems to draw our attention to skin itself – a continuous surface that wraps around and contains the body; a barrier as well as an erogenous zone.

Other works take up this playful approach to nudity by drawing on the irresistible draw of sexually explicit material. In Fingers Crossed, the crease of armpit skin purports to be a vagina; in Homemade, the squeezed edge of an elbow takes on the peachy roundness of a bottom being licked; and in Cookie Jar, two fingers plunge suggestively into the fold of skin behind a bent knee. The effect of these works is unsettling. On the one hand, the flawless, childlike aesthetic of the role-playing body parts (small, smooth, unshaven) is a disturbing reminder of the unrealistic imaging of women’s bodies in porn and wider media, even while we are aware that they are not what they appear to be. On the other hand, the soft imperfections of Colwell’s mark-making, the way in which the image seems to baulk at its own hyper-realism as you step towards it, sending out sprinkles of charcoal dust, feels like an invitation to rethink what makes an image erotic – in the true sense of the word, stemming from the Greek for love, passion and life force – rather than sexually explicit or pornographic.

Take, for instance, Praise the Lord, which depicts two feet pressed together in a prayer-like pose above a vagina. Here, Colwell makes the explicit part of the image secondary to the feet not just through the lower positioning of the vagina on the canvas but in the attention paid to the moment of tactile connection, where the two soles come together and arch away, the creases and the curves of the skin, the interplay of shadow and light. What’s ultimately being depicted here is a moment of intimacy with the self and while it has the potential to be erotic or arousing, that part is left to our imagination.

In this work, as in others, the veined surface of the vellum gives the body a mottled appearance, suggestive not only of stone (Colwell began these works during a residency in Venice) but also of transparency, as though revealing the intricate network of blood vessels beneath. The body becomes substance and matter but rather than being objectifying, it is a perspective that allows us to step out of the role of the voyeur and to appreciate the body for its artistic, expressive and sensual possibilities.

Saskia Colwell's solo exhibition, ‘Skin on Skin’, is at Victoria Miro, Venice until 15 March 2025

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