Exhibition Review: Francis Bacon at the Royal Academy of Arts is a theater of sensual mastery
Francis Bacon: Man and Beast needs no introduction or press marketing, this article very well streams into the endless traffic of articles on Bacon’s ideological acuity and visual ingenuity.
Occupying the main galleries of Royal Academy’s Burlington House from 29 January to 17 April, it is a spectacle to behold, a space where you funnel through the marble walls of the main gallery bombarded sensorially with haunting images of human struggle. The gallery’s grandeur matches Bacon’s venerable appreciation of facets of the human experience usually kept under wraps – waste, dirt, instability, turmoil, sex and carnal desire. He commands our attention and reminds us of our innermost primordial passions and sensations. The Man and Beast exhibition is a curatorial feat commanding us to look inward and not look away. Be floored, startled, and amazed by Bacon’s will of the brush – his complex imagining of color, texture, imagery and scale. Bacon compels one to stare, scrutinize and finally appreciate the deepest, most intense octaves of the human soul. We’ll see how he does this in the subsequent paragraphs.
Bacon’s images borders on horror, terror-inducing subjects, extraterrestrial beings and bodies, otherwordly. Mouths agape, scratches on surfaces, faceless subjects, convulsing bodies, distorted faces, misshaped abdomens, dismembered limbs. Head VI (1949), Figure Study II, (1945-46) are such images. One can almost hear the deafening scream emanating from these horrific jaws, that are accompanied with forceful vertical brush strokes painted directionally downwards. It imitates the sense of movement, it invokes tactility, it mimics a sensation, a pulse, a certain dizzying vibration that overwhelms an individual in times of distress. The feathers of the brush feature in these translucent strokes, with minimal paint applied, it impersonates the screeching tires of a car leaving black marks on the road.
Head VI (1949), Francis Bacon, Oil on canvas
Figure Study II (1945-46), Francis Bacon, Oil on canvas
Bacon’s images echo the very public mass horrors of war veterans who survived the first world war with violent scars scored on their faces. It is made known by historians that many war veterans required facial prosthetics to mend the irreversible facial disfigurements they suffered on the frontlines. Not only were there many having to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but many were also left living with facial deformities that caused quite an unnerving sense of body dysmorphia in these soldiers who were predominantly male. Left handicapped and traumatized, heady post-war consciousness, was captured by Bacon - a kaleidoscope of neurosis, struggle and catharsis.
Guest curated by art historian and friend of Bacon – Michael Peppiatt – the marble pillars, arches, high ceilings and spaciousness of the Royal Academy’s Burlington House main gallery captures that theater of emotion. The muted brown ochre walls are silent so that Bacon's canvases captivate and fully command your attention. Walking into the gallery, one is comfortably transformed into a puppet on strings. Carefully illuminated like a cinema, Bacon’s spectacularly large triptychs and canvases are enveloped beautifully by the dimmed lighting of the gallery, acting as a contemplative depressant for the viewer, ever heightening the intensity of Bacon’s vision. It illustrates very publicly our private struggles. The shame we feel in coming emotionally undone, in weakness, in terror, and neurosis of human experience.
Francis Bacon: Man and Beast Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts
Bacon’s use of color is also peculiar; it is otherworldly, blocks of flat, concrete colors mostly highly saturated. His work Second Version of Triptych (1944), is absolutely visually striking and gripping. Particularly his generous use of red, which he lines in an elongated, foreshortened, broad rectangular line in a space which mimics that of a red carpet. The majesty of red, and the sensational, pulsating association with blood, runs vigorously through the entire image. It reminds the viewer of one's deepest, rawest sensations and feelings that fester in the darkness of one’s room. Be it lust, desire. At the edge of Bacon’s canvas lie innate erotic, sexual forces he enlivens through a variety of textures, colour, associative abstract and concrete imagery.
Second Version of Triptych (1944), Francis Bacon, Oil on canvas
As a child, Bacon had intimate contact with animals and was fascinated with the study of animals all his life. He saw parallels between animals and human inclinations; feverish passions, intense desire, the indestructible, latent, ever-so intense forces of nature mired within every individual. Bacon enlivens that using animal imagery. He uses the bull, who he employs effectively as a representation of intense, intuitive forcefulness. The bull’s outline, its horns, its silhouette sees itself in Study for Bullfight No. 1 (1969). Brush strokes animate the gush of wind alongside its swinging head. Fluid, pools and streaks of color smoothly whisked together also accompany the image, the spirit of the individual struck by the bull.
The renown of Bacon is not in his eccentric character and lifestyle that drew attention, not in his homosexuality or his intensely sexual nature – although these ostensibly contributed to his stardom and artistry – it is Bacon’s ability to capture the complexity and beauty of the human experience. The beauty of one’s undoing, the beauty of human crises. His artistic legacy leaves us poignantly pondering over the integral strand of life – the very universal experience of suffering. Bacon makes us look inwards and not away at the most unsightly parts of ourselves. He makes us love ourselves for ourselves. The viewer is compelled to surrender to those forces and embrace them. That is the greatness and the best of Francis Bacon, masterfully displayed at the Royal Academy. For 25 pounds, every individual should feel Francis Bacon: Man and Beast ambience. A theater of masterful sensuality.