FractalMix

After I made "The Abuse" with a picture of a seriously injured girl found in the web I couldn’t avoid thinking about Francis Bacon and his unpleasant images of corrupt, violent and disgusting humanity. Bacon deliberately subverted artistic conventions to show " the evils of man, rather than the virtues of Christ " and caused repulse with his nightmarish imagery of half-human, half-animal creatures. " Visitors were brought up short ," wrote the critic John Russell, " by images so unrelieved awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them ". Typical of his paintings in the 1950s were his Screaming Popes , a series of pictures based on Velázquez's serene portrait of Pope Innocent X , but distorted into images of hysterical fear and alienation. The men I painted were all in extreme situations, and the scream is a transcription of their pain. Some of his figures were shown alongside sides of raw meat. Many appear to be enclosed in glass...