FRANCIS BACON
The paintings of Francis Bacon seem to be solely about invoking a kind of visceral response. Even though when Francis talks about his work, he says a lot about the beauty of the colors of flesh and the human form, this is not really what we get from the images. The images seem to be more about power than beauty. We often see figures placed against sickly, undefined backgrounds. Sometimes they are deliberately confined within line-drawing-style cubes representing architecture. The stark environments read as a sort of psychological landscape, but not one that is healthy. The cubes drawn around screaming figures read as a sort of confining architecture of the psyche, or the inevitable psychological distance that is always present between two humans. The images are bleak and borderline frightening, but they possess their own kind of beauty in a tortured way. Francis talks about desperately trying to imitate the colors of the flesh on the inside of the mouth, but the mouths always turn out black. This kind of desperate approach, or always trying to get at something but never actually getting there seems to exemplify the human condition in and of itself. The figures keep screaming, and most of the time they are not anchored within the space; They seem to be vanishing, sometimes literally with halves of heads evaporating into space; Francis Bacon dosen’t let us forget our mortality. All of these ideas come to us in the form of immediate sensation. The images of Francis Bacon have a starkness and power that penetrates our psyche within the first few seconds of viewing the paintings. They are psychologically tortured images coming from a psychologically tortured man reminding us of our own psychological torture, even if we’ve never had any. In this sense, these images transcend interpretation. These were never intended to be overanalyzed. It seems the only proper response to one of Francis’s paintings is to scream back at it.
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