Estragon : Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me!
Stay with me!
Vladimir : Did I ever leave you?
Estragon : You let me go.
-Samual Beckett
The paintings of Francis Bacon are about the consequences of being let go ( after once having been held ). The self portraits as well as the Dyer portraits are demonstrations of loss , the moment of abandonment in particular is held in a perpetual freeze . In the words of John Berger , Bacon demonstrated " how alienation may provoke a longing for its absolute form - which is mindlessness".
From "The Unnamble" :
Unfortunately I am afraid , as always , of going on- now I am fixed, lost for tininess , or straining against the wall, with my head, my hands, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories , my old story, as if it were the first time.
The 'going on ' in Bacon's world was his equivalent of the green room , an antechamber to a world stage , most often his bathroom . The room adjacent to the world as place of scrutiny, brain casings like the walls the playwright referred to - a relentless claustrophobia where thoughts chew their own cud and the nervous system is laid bare . And yet this chamber, like a frozen meat locker , is also the place where the artist's own rawness is safeguarded , the despair contained and harvested for greatness, albeit the greatness of the anti-hero.
Bacon was one of the 20th century's greatest masters . He belongs to a tradition that begins with Gericault , particularly with the portraits done at Le Salpetierre asylum. These unflinching depictions of loss are congruent with Bacon's work in the 1970s, many of which were later auctioned off into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Unlike Beckett however, with his penchant for linking sorrow and humor, Bacon favored the grotesquery of loss and loneliness ; the body loosing itself from its own container , spilling out onto cold tile , and under an unforgiving glare that expesses the body as fetishized object and the mind its sadistic spectator . What lies on the other side is the eternalized trace of the departed , so the subject - Bacon, at other times Dyer - stakes his territory and stages something akin to a one man show right there in the anteroom. The subject of the play is Leaving and Staying. Though the theme may overtly be he who has been left , it also concerns the intransigence of the artist toward extending this narrative to new possibilities. Bacon stayed glued to this theme for the rest of his life.
Stay with me!
Vladimir : Did I ever leave you?
Estragon : You let me go.
-Samual Beckett
The paintings of Francis Bacon are about the consequences of being let go ( after once having been held ). The self portraits as well as the Dyer portraits are demonstrations of loss , the moment of abandonment in particular is held in a perpetual freeze . In the words of John Berger , Bacon demonstrated " how alienation may provoke a longing for its absolute form - which is mindlessness".
From "The Unnamble" :
Unfortunately I am afraid , as always , of going on- now I am fixed, lost for tininess , or straining against the wall, with my head, my hands, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories , my old story, as if it were the first time.
The 'going on ' in Bacon's world was his equivalent of the green room , an antechamber to a world stage , most often his bathroom . The room adjacent to the world as place of scrutiny, brain casings like the walls the playwright referred to - a relentless claustrophobia where thoughts chew their own cud and the nervous system is laid bare . And yet this chamber, like a frozen meat locker , is also the place where the artist's own rawness is safeguarded , the despair contained and harvested for greatness, albeit the greatness of the anti-hero.
Bacon was one of the 20th century's greatest masters . He belongs to a tradition that begins with Gericault , particularly with the portraits done at Le Salpetierre asylum. These unflinching depictions of loss are congruent with Bacon's work in the 1970s, many of which were later auctioned off into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Unlike Beckett however, with his penchant for linking sorrow and humor, Bacon favored the grotesquery of loss and loneliness ; the body loosing itself from its own container , spilling out onto cold tile , and under an unforgiving glare that expesses the body as fetishized object and the mind its sadistic spectator . What lies on the other side is the eternalized trace of the departed , so the subject - Bacon, at other times Dyer - stakes his territory and stages something akin to a one man show right there in the anteroom. The subject of the play is Leaving and Staying. Though the theme may overtly be he who has been left , it also concerns the intransigence of the artist toward extending this narrative to new possibilities. Bacon stayed glued to this theme for the rest of his life.