Continuing through February 7, 2026.

In Roger Corman’s 1963 sci-fi horror movie, “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” Ray Milland plays a scientist, Dr Xavier, who discovers a serum that gives him X-ray vision. At a cocktail party he is able to see through the clothing of gyrating dancers, but the vision intensifies alarmingly. His eyes go inky black and madness ensues. There are some things man is meant not to see or know!

Belgian artist David Deweerdt has happily evaded such punishment for what may seem a similar crime against nature. His (literally) penetrating figure paintings have been exhibited in Belgium and France for the past twenty-five years, and is currently showing in San Francisco for the second time. “Excessive Body” comprises a collection of eighteen images of solitary figures that are partially or fully stripped of flesh. They recall the plaster flayed figures (écorchés) that academic painters used to learn anatomy, following the precedents of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and 16th-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius. Deweerdt’s take on the figure is also descended from the contemporary plastinated cadavers of Gunther Von Hagens and the morgue-sourced art-historical pastiches of Joel-Peter Witkin. Sensitive, triggerable viewers should be advised that the artist’s subcutaneous “body envelopes” of muscles, tendons, bones and viscera are not literal, but stylistic. Deweerdt’s knowledge of anatomy drives his painterly improvisations in evoking the feeling of the thing, bypassing the bother of literal illustration, to paraphrase Francis Bacon.

Deweerdt’s “excessive bodies” (individual works are untitled) are painted in acrylic and ink glazes onto sheets of vertical-format 39 3/8 x 27 1/2 inch white mylar sheets that are mounted unframed to the walls a few inches apart. There is no apparent sequence or narrative; we react to each portrait individually. At the same time, the works are so closely spaced, each on its clinical white backdrop, that we cannot ignore the array, which exceeds the sum of its parts to form a sobering yet beautiful procession.

Several paintings clearly derive from figure studies. “Untilted (02)” and “Untitled (14)” depict a large-bellied man of middle age standing in profile and seen from the rear, respectively. Each is cropped at the neck and knees. Rendered in a warm palette of siennas, earthy reds and oranges that suggest both muscle and fat, and complemented by patches of icy, brilliant blue, these images remind us of the temperature differentials revealed by infrared thermal imaging.

“Untitled (04)” and “Untitled (16)” present hunched and slumping figures of a young male adopting studio poses expressing despair or remorse that will be familiar to devotees of Rodin. “Untitled (05)” and “Untitled (13)” depict young females kneeling and standing, but again are cropped and incomplete. Fiery emanations suggest ectoplasmic eruptions. “Untitled (07)” depicts a figure seen from the back that further challenges our notions of bodily image. It kneels, legs crossed and hands positioned as if bound, so that the limbs resemble flippers. The head is submerged behind the hill of his upper back to resemble some flattened, fleshy sea turtle minus its shell.

Hybrid figures that are partly skeletal or partly animal convey the presence of a medical specimen bottle or the carnival sideshow. The disembodied skulls and vertebrae in “Untitled (01), “Untitled (12),” and ”Untitled (36)” remain mysteriously alive with painterly color and energy, as do the eviscerated female torso in “Untitled (03),” the scapula-batwing formed creature of “Untitled (10),” and the hung-beef carcasses of “Untitled (09),” which is reminiscent of slaughterhouse-pathos works by Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon, a cheerful pessimist who was fond of reminding pals like Lucian Freud that “You have only to consider the meat on your plate.”

Deweerdt’s gravitational dance of attraction-repulsion is perfectly calibrated to hold us in orbit around these strange bodies. They are secular, unsentimental contemporary counterparts of Renaissance memento mori paintings and medieval transi sculptures. This is bracing stuff, perhaps even an aesthetic medicine, designed to awaken us from our dogmatic slumber in this inhumane time.