ABSTRACT
Two other examples are worth mentioning here. The first is the experiment Fabric Epithelia, which highlighted the inlucency of skin. In contrast to the previously mentioned fictional neoplasms, this project was real and aimed to use engineered skin as matter for a new living textile, exploring the aesthetic and technical advances of in vitro grown skin tissue. Secondly, James Elkins refers extensively to Francis Bacon and his ability to represent different degrees of skin depth in the human body. For Elkins, ‘Bacon has been most successful in thinking his way toward a kind of fluid body that is at once inside and outside, where there is no longer any sense to the inside/outside dichotomy’.62 Referring to Bacon’s appreciation of the ‘“great beauty of the color of
meat”’, he argues that ‘Bacon achieved a synthesis of inside and outside, surface and viscera, that is unique in the history of art’.63 His paintings in fact entail a notion of deep skin through the blurriness of several cutaneous layers in movement that are rendered translucent. Elkins’s portrayal of these is illustrative:
Such a description lets us perceive the act of Bacon’s painting as a kind of pictorial kneading, in which the recurrent strokes of oil painting merge and energize the outer surfaces with the inner layers of the body. His representation of deep skin is an ultimate creation of inlucent flesh.
