"The loss of love and sex, and about how it felt to have that passion… trying to remember, remember that desire and remember what it felt like to be entwined with someone. A lot of my work has become more abstract, more vague, and that’s because the memory is blurry."
Tracey Emin’s But you never wanted me from 2018 embodies the searing vulnerability and passion that has come to define the artist’s painterly vision. Emerging in the 1990s as the fresh-faced enfant terrible of the Young British Artists movement, Emin has staked her claim as one of the most definitive artistic voices of her generation, unflinching and acerbic in her confessional idiom. An uninhibited excavation of personal memory, the present work distills Emin’s innermost world into a tender exploration of love, desire, loss and grief, epitomizing her radically powerful approach to contemporary expressive figuration.
In the present work, Emin intimates the silhouette of a reclining nude within a composition redolent with fervor and longing. Swathes of ivory, mulberry, and onyx lay bare the emotional turmoil of romantic yearning; Emin deftly exploits the liquidity of her chosen medium as jagged streaks of pigment elicit a spectral figure that is insubstantial and elusive. Thinned washes of paint and long drip tendrils toy with the viewer, falsely insisting that the paint has just been applied to the canvas and is still wet. The central female nude is defiantly faceless, yet she is wrought with emotion. Bereft of any indication of t.mes or place, the present work is a distillation of Emin’s stream of consciousness into accreted layers of love squandered and trust betrayed.
Throughout her practice, Emin has channeled her own experiences and personal traumas into artworks, as if refracting these experiences through a blistering form of visual poetry. Speaking to this exhibitionist impulse, Emin has said, “I want society to hear what I am saying… For me, being an artist isn’t just about making nice things or people patting you on the back; it’s some kind of communication, a message... about very, very simple things that can be really hard. People do get really lonely, people do get really frightened, people do fall in love, people do die, people do fuck. These things happen and everyone knows it but not much of it is expressed. Everything’s covered with some kind of politeness, continually, and especially in art…” (the artist in conversation with Stuart Morgan, ‘The Story of I’, Frieze, Issue 36, May 1997, p. 60)
“I want society to hear what I am saying… For me, being an artist isn’t just about making nice things or people patting you on the back; it’s some kind of communication, a message... about very, very simple things that can be really hard. People do get really lonely, people do get really frightened, people do fall in love, people do die, people do fuck. These things happen and everyone knows it but not much of it is expressed. Everything’s covered with some kind of politeness, continually, and especially in art…”
Channeling the lush sensuality of Cecily Brown and the lucid physicality of Cy Twombly, Emin demonstrates a fervent understanding of paint’s power to unearth the passion and suffering intrinsic to the human condition. She notes her process’s own cathartic power: “There’s a big difference between being thirty-five and fifty. Massive. And that’s what I’m trying to understand. Where does that girl go? Where does that youth go? That thing that’s lost, where has it gone? I’m looking for it in the pictures; I’m looking for it in the paintbrush.” (the artist quoted in: Morgan Meis, ‘The Empty Bed: Tracey Emin and the Persistent Self’, (online)). Extending from a history of fractured and fraught figuration in art, the primal urgency embodied by But you never wanted me is foundational to Emin’s own grammar of anguish.
The scene of rapture depicted in But you never wanted me engages in a self-reflexive dialogue of exorcism and exposition that is recurrent throughout Emin’s acclaimed oeuvre. As Emin alchemizes her memories of love and loss, conjuring the visceral roots of those experiences, so too does the viewer traverse their own memories through the abstracted gestures of But you never wanted me. Ultimately, Emin’s artistic project is a body of work that speaks the language of humanity in all its imperfect and inconsistent glory.
