Skip to main content

Francis Bacon is the guy!


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 boxes, suggesting isolation and despair.
Ham, pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very beautiful. And it’s all for sale—how unbelievably surrealistic!

Critics and the public alike admired his ability to use oils with a sumptuous richness to express images of horror or degradation.
Flesh and meat are life! If I paint red meat as I paint bodies it is just because I find it very beautiful.

In his paintings the human face and body are subjected to extremes of contortion and distortion.
My painting is not violent; it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.

The paint is used to smudge and twist the subjects into formless, slug-like creatures of dark and horror fantasy.

Painting can be as violent as fucking, like an orgasm or an ejaculation. The result is often disappointing, but the process is highly exciting.
Heavy drinker and gambler, Bacon’s personal life was dissolute.
I have no moral lesson to preach, nor any advice to give.

He was also homosexual and lived extremely hard core experiences at his "sex-haunting expeditions" on the streets of London and Paris.
I have been lucky enough to be able to live on my obsession. This is my only success.

Despite his paintings race up to huge prices he cared hardly at all for material possessions:

I want to die as I was born: with nothing.
I saw a documentary about his techniques and I must say that his studio was a real "horror’s chamber", so dirty, poor, dark and rotten it was.


When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.

Well, today I woke up praying for Bacon to get more of him and on the same direction.

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.
And also I must praise Mark Townsend for his extraordinary invention: Sprite!

With Sprite artists have a new dimension opened for the most vivid experiences of visuality on fractals.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sol LeWitt is gone (to the heaven).

Much has been written on Sol LeWitt ´s work. Instead of adding something that others can better say I prefer just to reproduce his Sentences on Conceptual Art (First published in 1969), that became a key moment on the idea of art today. The structures he explored on his works derived from elements of the cube and its drawings on wall redefined the parameters of the art in years 70, and continue to influence the artists of the new generations for their simplicity and for their Metaphysical aura. It´s interesting for us, digital artists, to see how the concepts of LeWitt can be explored (and extended) in the work of programmers-artists like Casey Reas . About the possibility that Sol left to the heaven - and not to the hell - I assume it due the "Clarity, beauty, playfulness. Simplicity, logic, openness. The words that come to mind when describing the work of Sol LeWitt resonate with essential aesthetic and intellectual values. His works are straightforward and legible. Yet, upon cl...
1 comment
Read more

Four quotes on the conquest of space

"Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival." Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski, Skylife, 2000. "We must turn our guns away from each other and outwards, to defend the Earth, creating a global and in space network of sensors and telescopes to find asteroids that could destroy our planet and create the systems to stop them. It makes no sense to dream great dreams while waiting to be hit by a train." Buzz Aldrin and Rick Tumlinson, Ad Astra Online, 2006. "The question to ask is whether the risk of traveling to spa...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Counts Now is an Attitude

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. - Mark Rothko Very seldom do we find that algorithmic artists have an eye on reality. In fact, most artists of our medium are very reluctant to abandon the vain belief that "beauty" is the only goal achievable by art. But how do we work exclusively for "beauty" in the context of political violence, terrorism and childhood trauma? How can the beautiful-only forms be made visually appealing in these times of sexual vulgarization and AIDS? It's clear isn't it, that art isn't rolling over an empty and free road of pure beauty anymore, but instead, a major issue among artists now is how to reconstitute beauty in a contemporary context of fear and social deception? I strongly believe that fractals are a useful tool for making the hidden, visible, but I als...
Post a Comment
Read more