Francis Bacon's paintings at his recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are powerful visual manifestations of a dialogue with mortality, loss, alienation, time, sanity, and the brief nature and struggle of life, form and decay. The viewer's struggle to grasp elusive "form," yet experiencing something material left behind by a man who is dead and in the ground, is overwhelming. His forms are as elusive, and frustratingly so, as trying to grasp this illusion we call "Reality." One takes grand comfort in the solidarity, of someone being able to express this intangible quality of life, in so tangible a form as painting with Bacon affirming so poignantly, form as a mere suggestion, a whir of energy translated into color. Each painting, a poem. His color palate, even dissected from an idea of form, is beautiful and viscerally meaningful, in the same way de Kooning's colors hit me.
Bacon's forms are tortured, struggling for solidity, struggling to come into being. Melting away. A whisper away from cascading into darkness. Light and color being a brief manifestation, a gathering of dust particles, if even. Form as an "event" in the way a firework explodes into the sky for a briefly beautiful, exciting yet violent and quietly disappearing moment.
There's nothing to grasp or hold on to. Meat and carcass, the fragility of the body. And yet, these forms exist in their own confined space, a stage, a ring, a glass box, not physical, defined by just lines...self imposed? Sometimes there's a door in frame. Exit or entrance? Freedom or hell? Can it even open? Or is it just a picture? A tease of the cosmic joke variety. Conclusion, we are a perpetual and delicate balancing act between extremes. Being and not. Spatial materiality and energy. Flesh and spirit. Love and torture. Beast/deformed and human form. Order and disorder. Becoming and receding. Scream and silence. Authority and powerlessness. I and the Other. Insane and sublime... The triptychs confirm relativity, perpetual change in spatial/time relationship, non-authority of a single take. Time and event is constantly being dissected like a film reel, and form within that, constantly disintegrating.
The only thing, the exhibit, although quite extensive and filling, was missing a lot of his works. I thought it would be a more thorough collection. Also reminds me, I have to watch "Love is the Devil" again for the umpteeth time, one of my favorite films, directed by John Maybury. It focuses on Bacon's life with George Dyer, his lover and muse, who ultimately killed himself. Yes, tragic. He did it in their hotel room on the night of Bacon's opening at the Grand Palais in Paris. Bacon was the only other foreign artist next to Picasso to have been given that highest honor. If ever the opportunity to see "Devil" on the big screen, do so. The film is very painterly, with a story as intense as Bacon's paintings, as intense as his life.
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