From the very beginning, painting functions as a saving grace for Tracey Emin, whose practice has turned into a biographical battleground. Here, we are dealing with an extraordinary artist whose grasp of life, combined with a set of unconventional principles, embraces transparency and perceives sensory experiences as a primary force.

Works produced around notions of love, passion, pain, sexuality, abandonment, and loneliness take on an even deeper interiority following her health crisis in 2021. They gain significance and distinctiveness within a psyche liberated from its fears. Confronted sharply by the reality of death yet surviving it, Emin embarks on an endless interrogation of consolation and meaning. At the same time, she documents the immeasurable pleasure derived from upholding, at every moment, her strong passions tied to an unusual pursuit of love.

a chaos washed in red

In these works -where we encounter an ambiguous chaos in which the encompassing power of style converges with an inner energy, and where sexuality is a predominant element- we see that physical decay and emotional collapse become problematized in a conspicuous manner. Especially in her most recent paintings, we come across a certain fetishistic iconography that triggers the pleasurable aspects of the work while depicting a fracture in emotionality a chaos, or perhaps a schizoid configuration of the painful thrill of abandonment.

Often formed on canvases dominated by intense reds, Emin’s paintings evolve into a complex and layered system, where emotions intrude linearly into a spontaneous mind-body rapport. In observing the cause-and-effect relationships within these works, one clearly sees a kind of dialectic that rattles memory undoubtedly a product of a realist perspective. Smeared across the canvas surface is a pioneering color, around which other tones and lines emerge in a formless area, creating a concentration of chaos. Most notably, the shade of red poured around the sexual organs, establishing a hegemonic and distinctly feminine emotional intensity, seems to escalate into an aggression beyond the limits of imagination. Within this red-blue tangle at the center, traumatic phenomena are laid bare one by one, receiving their share of all forms of violence. Consequently, Emin’s nude figures merge on a transparent bed devoid of perspective, entering a life-and-death reckoning within a cavern that extends into eternity, burdened by the instinctual obligations of love and passion.

On the other hand, Tracey Emin’s paintings also resemble an empathy experiment forged with an impossible death one that depicts moments seemingly on par with dying but from which the fear of death has now vanished. Meanwhile, that ambiguous chaos we have mentioned refers to a merciless comprehension in which passions remain unfettered, where notions of self-interest and selfishness are eliminated, and in which the pursuit of love and sexuality is sanctified in a true dream realm. Perhaps it can be said that where trauma exists, the image becomes more complex and continually smeared in red through deliberate exaggeration. Indeed, what Emin deems so vital and necessary is this jolting and traumatic dialogue with the self, sustained by the ever-active creative act that she strives to keep alive at all times, underpinned by her dominant impulses.