4. On Abstraction and Dissolving
Anatomical Forms
Study For Portrait of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, 1964.
LV / 2015
From On Abstraction and Dissolving Anatomical Forms, 2015
Francis Bacon’s paintings portray techniques of isolation. He exhibits form as an isolated icon and produces disturbed realities. Deleuze critiques and observes the primordial ways Bacon portrays people, icons, and figures into his work. First, Deleuze points out that Bacon takes rudimentary, or involving limited basic principles to the figure – the circular and round. It can completely take over a painting or give it its place. By creating or choosing an object that is round and circular, Bacon creates a primitive language. Depicting his subjects almost as animals or in an animalistic way retains the principle of humans being animals.
In Study After Velazquez Portrait of Pope Innocent X, he paints a haunting atmosphere of whatseems to be a pope screaming in a chair, or throne. Again, Bacon produces an isolated reality as a possible way of escaping the figure. The psychological horror of Bacon’s painting also produces obscure qualities that we question: Is that a dream? Or is this a reality? Obviously, a screaming pope would probably not be seen in reality, as this is Bacons personal opinion and feelings of the church. However, if this were reality, we could identify the extended rays of light seen as a white vail being thrown over our eyes, which obscures the object or figure indefinitely. Bacon makes for an extremely interesting painter because he uses distortion to dismantle the face, which makes this piece so compelling because he literally is destroying an icon. Bacon’s technique of scrubbing theface and rediscovering the head produces animalistic qualities as man becomes animal, and the animal becoming the spirit. Bacon depicted this pope as nothing but a screaming animal – no matter how holy the figure appears to be or believes he is. Bacon uses painting to construct and constitute a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal. It is an illustrative, figurative and narrative character of objects into pure extraction and isolation.
Emtombment, Jacopo Pontormo, 1528.
LV / 2015
From On Figure, Disfiguration, Transfiguration: Mannerism V. High Classicism
Many mistake High Renaissance and Mannerism to be identical, when in fact they are greatly different. High Classicism has no unified character, not to say it is a less or more beautiful than the other art, but that it is classical in beauty of balance and order. It is a constructed dissociation of space and picture surface. It is central to one idea: Mannerism favors compositional tension as well as artificial qualities. Renaissance painting explores intellectual and harmonious ideals. Mannerism presents itself as the anticlassical style. It attracts elongated formed, unbalanced poses, collapsed perspectives and irrational settings. Clearly, it is seen as the odder and weirder form of classicism, and not a bad representation.
Mannerism may be the first sign of abstraction we see in early art because it breaks away from tradition, and no longer supports an idealized standard of art. It is completely autonomous because it is opposed to vusual convention, and does not answer to a standard abstraction, meaning perspective is a kind of abstraction but in which one is attempting illusion. It is not an optical illusion, but answers to its own conditions. Mannerism nearly defies laws of nature because it is not about creating the object in a new way, or how the artist sees it, or how one should see it, but how one does not see it, or how one might have seen it. It is a distortion or hallucination of appearance. Every time art goes into a primitive stage, should an alternative experience or style take in its place.