Saville's work resembles Ballard's in a number of ways.He has said he wanted to be a painter and it is true that he is a highly pictorial writer. His books can be seen as galleries of images--empty swimming pools, abandoned hotels, low-flying aircraft, deserted cities reclaimed by jungle. These images recur again and again and they are part of a project that is pursued throughout his writings.All Ballard's work is a war against memory, but the intent is not to forget. It is to turn the debris of personal time--such as memories of his childhood in Shanghai--into image that are impersonal and emptied of time. The aim is to short-circuit the normal mechanisms of perception, and the dissolution of the personality that results from this process is imagined as a kind of freedom.

John Gray

The Landscape of the Body: Ballard, Bacon, and Saville, London, May 2005

Linda Nochlin

Migrants, New York, March 2003

David Sylvester

Areas of Flesh, London, January 1994

Simon Schama

Interview with Jenny Saville, New York, May 2005