Bodies, self-eviscerated through sexual longing: Such longing is, more or less, a foil for our own deepest insecurities, that well of unfulfillment at the very core. “Sex and Solitude,” the first institutional exhibition in Italy dedicated to Tracey Emin’s work, focuses mostly on her distressed figurations, aided in particular through the fluidity of the medium of painting, which has lately been her primary field of creation. There Was No Right Way,2022, is typical of her recent work: a shattered body etching out its form in a series of ultramarine lines violently dashed onto the canvas, the surrounding landscape obscured beneath white overpainting. The shoulder resembles a mountaintop, from which two breasts droop. As in nearly all of Emin’s abstract figurations, the artist attempts to elicit the feeling of being wrenched apart with force, overcome by some imperious emotional impetus and discarded in the abyss. This painting occupies the same room as a pink-neon work, Love Poem for CF,2007, which spells out across the wall, in part, EVERY PART OF MY BODY / IS SCREAMING / SMASHED INTO A THOUSAND / MILLION PIECES.
On the wall on the other side of this neon, we can see a painting even gorier than There Was No Right Way. A spread-legged body in black and bloodred smudges is bludgeoned; the legs are nearly all that can be made out in this symphony of leakage, titled Everything is moving nothing Feels Safe. You made me Feel like This, 2018. Such images suggest a reunion of the sex and death drives, which, separated at birth when we are cast momentarily into a state of innocence, gradually reconfigure, marrying us to a path of extinction.
Emin sets herself quite a challenge by choosing to paint with acrylics rather than oils. It’s incredibly difficult to get the sense of layeredness that she’s going for with this stubborn plasticized material. Because You Kept Touching Me, 2019, looks almost cheap, its diluted cloudy white striving to cover the red line work that once formed the background. What this yields is a whole other form of erasure: a formal restraint that tempers the corporeal excesses that override in works such as There was blood, 2022, which foregrounds a thick-dicked male figure dogging the female protagonist from behind. All that erasure—the rejection of skin, of surface, the desire to crawl out of it. We are all victims of what we repress.
For all its explicitness, Emin’s work ultimately makes being vulnerable and emotionally honest look cool. (It’s the opposite of cringe.) The raw emotional earnestness of Emin’s paintings is decidedly rooted in the 1990s YBA sensibility she was instrumental in shaping. Despite the era’s associations with irony, the ’90s reserved a special place for expressions of sincerity; selling out was the worst thing you could do. Really, the decade witnessed the last gasp of romanticism. Walking around Florence, with its crowds of study-abroad college students crowding the narrow lanes and piazzas, I couldn’t help but wonder what they will make of the 2020 painting on which is scrawled I WANTED YOU TO FUCK ME SO MUCH I COULDN’T PAINT ANYMORE. Will they recoil, citing it as an instance of “gaslighting”? The youngest generation is said to be prudish. Zoomers don’t fuck—at least that’s what I keep reading in the papers. In this, I suppose they’re doing their part to contribute to the demise of our species. But what about love? Will love survive in the absence of the human? That is the ultimate question Emin leaves us with, and in its truest form of authenticity, she suggests, love can never really be untangled from sex.
