The Naked Canvas: Sensuality, Desire and the Art That Dares

By Simon Kenny | 7 min read

Sensuality in art encompasses far more than explicit imagery. Artists have used colour, texture and mark-making to evoke desire without depicting it, from the erotic frescoes of ancient Pompeii to the coded canvases of queer abstraction. Abstract art shifts erotic attention away from the body as object and toward desire as a felt, interior state.

This post is part of The Weight of Feeling, my ongoing series on how art carries the full range of human experience. In the first part, I looked at how art captures what love cannot say. In this post, we focus on the body.

What is the difference between depicting desire and evoking it in art?

Depicting desire shows you something. Evoking it makes you feel something. The distinction has shaped the entire history of how artists have handled the erotic, and explains why some of the most sensual paintings ever made contain no bodies at all.

I have been making abstract work for long enough to understand that paint is a physical thing. It carries weight, warmth, resistance. A thick stroke of ochre laid down with a palette knife holds pressure in the same way skin does. Viewers sometimes step toward a canvas before they catch themselves and step back, and I believe they are responding to something physical in the surface. The eye alone does not explain it.

Neuroscience offers a framework here. Research into haptic visuality, the feeling of touch induced by sight alone, shows that viewing certain textures in visual art can measurably affect bodily sensations and embodied experience. The brain does not need anatomy to enter a state of anticipation. Warm flesh-adjacent colours, flowing lines and layered impasto surfaces pull on the same circuitry that responds to human closeness.

Claim: Research into haptic visuality demonstrates that viewing textures in visual art can measurably affect bodily sensations and body-ownership-related experience, even without literal physical contact.
Source: Pearce et al., School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, 2016.

Why has sensuality in art been censored, hidden and then rediscovered?

The history of erotic art is a history of strategies. When the door is locked, the work finds a side entrance. Pompeii and Herculaneum produced extraordinary quantities of explicit imagery, from wall paintings to sculptural erotica. When those cities were excavated in the 18th and 19th centuries, the material was quietly transferred to what became the Secret Cabinet of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, a room repeatedly locked, relocked and reopened according to the political climate of each era.

Victorian Britain ran a parallel operation. Sexually explicit antiquities sat in museum collections under restricted access, available only on formal application. The pattern of hiding something while acting surprised it was ever there is not limited to one country or century.

The UK Obscene Publications Act 1959 built a legal hinge around the word “merit.” Artistic, literary, scientific or educational merit could be argued as a defence against obscenity, which pushed artists toward ambiguity and formal experimentation as both a practical and an aesthetic strategy. The 1960 prosecution of Penguin Books over Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a cultural pivot. It established that seriousness and explicitness could coexist in the eyes of a court.

Contemporary equivalents are everywhere. Egon Schiele’s nudes were ruled too explicit for London transport advertising as recently as 2018. Platform rules on nudity continue to create friction for museums sharing canonical works online. The erotic in art is always co-authored by the distribution system. Laws define risk, platforms define visibility, institutions define legitimacy.

Claim: The UK Obscene Publications Act 1959 defines obscenity around the likelihood of depraving and corrupting, while permitting a public good defence for material of artistic, literary, scientific or educational merit.
Source: House of Lords Library, Legal Information Briefing Note LLN-2019-0103; legislation.gov.uk.

What does neuroscience tell us about why art can feel physical without being explicit?

The body does not switch off when you stand in front of a painting. Studies using physiological measures show that warm-hued environments in red and violet ranges generate higher skin conductance than cooler blue conditions. Broad curvature in lines and forms tends to feel safer and more inviting than sharp angles, because sharp contours carry implicit threat associations that activate amygdala responses.

Mark-making works as sensory language. A slow, curving brushstroke behaves differently from a hard scratch across dry paint. Thick gestures read as pressure. Thin washes read as air or heat. The most rigorous conclusion neuroaesthetics can support is this: sensual visual art recruits the same broad brain networks involved in reward, arousal and embodied simulation, while the precise character of the experience depends entirely on context and meaning. Tenderness and aggression can recruit the same circuitry. Art is one of the few places where that distinction stays in the viewer’s hands.

Claim: fMRI studies of viewing paintings show that aesthetic preference and beauty judgements consistently activate reward and valuation circuitry, including the medial orbitofrontal cortex, with activity increasing in proportion to perceived beauty.
Source: Vartanian and Goel, York University, peer-reviewed neuroaesthetic research.

The psychology of how abstract art affects us goes deeper than decoration. The physical charge of a painting is not incidental to its meaning. In many cases, it is the meaning.

How does abstraction handle desire differently from figurative art?

Psychology’s objectification theory proposes that viewing sexually objectifying imagery encourages an observer’s perspective rather than an embodied one, with downstream effects including self-monitoring, shame and disrupted felt experience. Neuroimaging evidence indicates sexualised bodies can be processed in a more object-like way under some conditions.

Abstraction resists this structurally. By shifting attention from specific anatomy to felt qualities, pressure, warmth, rhythm, closeness, desire becomes a state inside the viewer rather than something projected onto an external figure. The viewer has to do interpretive work. Identity and consent stay in the room because the image refuses an easy resolution. You project yourself into the work rather than consuming a body from the outside.

I do not paint the body. But I paint what the body knows. Every painting I make begins in something physical: pressure, temperature, the resistance of a palette knife against wet paint. What comes out on the canvas is not a picture of a feeling. It is the feeling itself, given form. When abstraction works in this territory, it is less like a photograph and more like weather. You stand inside it. Judgement comes later, if it comes at all.

Abstraction does not desexualise art. It de-objectifies it, returning the erotic to something closer to its origin, a human condition, fully lived rather than packaged for consumption.

How have queer artists used coded visual language to speak about desire?

If censorship pushed artists toward metaphor, queer history turned metaphor into survival technology. The Tate Britain exhibition Queer British Art 1861 to 1967 documented work made against the backdrop of partial decriminalisation in the UK, showing how gestural and semi-abstract handling could both reveal and conceal at once.

David Hockney’s early paintings are a precise example. The handling is confident enough to be legible to those with context, and ambiguous enough to deflect scrutiny from those without it. Abstraction becomes a coded whisper that still manages to be loud. Francis Bacon’s Triptych August 1972 holds figures locked between violence and embrace, carrying desire and grief together in a way only available to someone shaped by loss and stigma.

Zanele Muholi’s ongoing Faces and Phases series, described by the artist as visual activism, constructs an archive of Black LGBTQIA+ lives that is simultaneously intimate, proud and politically defiant. Keith Haring’s Ignorance equals Fear, Silence equals Death (1989) made desire explicitly political during the AIDS crisis. The erotic is often a claim to existence.

Claim: Zanele Muholi’s ongoing Faces and Phases series has been described as a form of visual activism, constructing an archive of Black LGBTQIA+ lives.
Source: Tate retrospective documentation, tate.org.uk; Time, 2021.

A closing thought

Sensuality in art has never been a simple matter of showing bodies. It has always been about what the work asks the viewer to feel, and whether the viewer is left holding a person or a possession. Abstract painting occupies a particular position in this history. It cannot depict, so it must evoke. In that constraint sits something genuinely valuable.

I have spent more than twenty years working in abstraction, and I still find my most physically charged canvases are often the ones where nothing firmly legible is happening. Something in the surface reaches out. I have not resolved why, and I do not think I want to.

Explore the collection or enquire about a commission if you are looking for something made to live with.