Sam Jinks

… A naked man is hung up by the armpits. The suspended man, with his drooping head and transcendent air of concentration, recalls the sacred archetype of Christ on the cross. It is as if, like Christ, he is hung up for maximum humiliation in a punishment that might be rehearsed in holy rituals for an obscure redemptive purpose. In another piece, a face of a man whose mouth has entirely dissolved into the flesh of the face, leaving a smooth and gentle volume between nose and bristly chin. The glazed eyes stand out with reddened thyroidal frenzy, almost as if expressing the suffocation involved in losing your nostrils and mouth…

The comprehensive level of detail, sinister as it may sound, border on utter obsession. The verisimilitude in the treatment removes you from the comfort of analogous images in the history of art. Australian hyper-realist sculptor Sam Jinks makes the skin look like skin, which is luminous and penetrated by light. You could imagine seeing pores and follicles if you took a microscope to the surface. His works have a powerful presence. And, like Ron Mueck’s work, he uses unsettling scale to create drama and induce emotions. In traditional aesthetic terms, Jinks’ naked hanging man is the wrong size. The figure is too small to be real, but too big to be a doll or figurine. The dwarfism with perfect proportions seems semantically inconvenient and disturbing when the figure turns real in your imagination. It is an embarrassing size for a man to have, as the mature body has the scale - but not the shape or detail - of a boy’s body.

Adapted from Robet Nelson’s review.