This is the kind of body featured in Unzipped, a sex mag for men.
This is the body soon to be featured in a piece written by the peerless Dave White.
Have
devotees of the rock hard decided to lighten up on their
fat phobia? It’s better than that. Their putting their phobias aside to
embrace art. Unzipped wants to add more substantial content to its theme, starting with Brian Murphy‘s self-portraits.
In a culture that fears fat the way ship captains
fear fatal storms, Murphy celebrates his bountiful flesh, turning his
face into a moon squashed against the picture plane and his torso into
a sky, with drifts of himself floating by.
Within his theme, his range extends beyond the celebratory. He can render
versions of his body with the tender exactitude Kafka used to describe
Gregor Samsa after his metamorphosis.
Jenny
Saville paints opalescent mounds of fleshy female (and pig) torsos,
sometimes but not always attached to fleshy heads. She works from photos; he works
from life.
To paint himself, he peers into a small, hand-held mirror, memorizing
as much of the results as he can carry in his head, painting that and
repeating the process.
Saville works with a grid. Murphy’s internal balances are far more
precarious. Saville paints slabs of meat; Murphy paints pieces of sky.
His flesh floats. It’s a massive volume with no weight, a pageant ready to melt into colored air.
