"Eat the Skin"
Exhibition
Exhibition
“I have consumed and I have been consumed,” writes Venn Miles. His first exhibition with OIGÅLL PROJECTS, Just Eat the Skin, is a visceral invitation into the volatility of intimacy, how desire marks the body and memory until both are warped beyond recognition.
Working in oil and charcoal, Miles rejects the idealised nude and instead renders the lived body: the dense foliage of hair, the hollow of a throat, the stamping of a foot. In his paintings, flesh is not smooth or obedient but raw, contradictory, and unstable. Limbs multiply, faces blur, torsos collapse and reform, figures caught between tenderness and violation, beauty and grotesque.
The works pulse with memory as both subject and method. Desire refracted across time produces afterimages that are sometimes romanticised, sometimes distorted, always charged. Each fragment of the body carries its own intensity, recalling the surrealist tradition where a part is invested with the weight of the whole.
Miles’ canvases oscillate between table and prey: paintings that seem both to offer themselves and to devour. In them, intimacy is never tidy. To be fully known is to be fully exposed to linger in the memory, in the body, in the dangerous space between holding on and letting go.