Francis Bacon / 1909-1992

Perhaps no artist of the 20th century expressed in painting the tragedy of existence more realistically than Francis Bacon. This does not mean the dramatic force of an abstract condition of human life or the representation of something that might accidentally happen in one's personallife, but the inner and unrepresentable sense of individual and intimate existence. In Bacon, rendering the sense of existence inevitably provokes a violently tragic expression. The tragic sense of existence is not a constant theme in every civilization, but it is a specific condition of European man in the modern era. And Bacon confronts it with such a concrete, penetrating, and truthful interpretation of human nature as to transform that sense into an immanent and disturbing reality. On the contrary, the objective reality of life becomes an appearance for him, which only the practice of painting can transform into a current and flagrant value. It is in the reality of the work, in its eternal present that the drama of subjective existential experience projects onto the sphere of tragedy. This interpretation of the sense of human life, mixed with explosive energy and desperation to the point of hysteria, is much truer than any realistic representation. Through its complete subjectivity, it cuts to the quick of an observer's most intimate sensibilities. Behind the growing awareness of the greatness of Bacon's work in the context of the 20th century is the fact that his paintings are anything but realistic, in the sense that they are not bound to any particular representation of appearances or episodes belonging to a specific, real event. Nevertheless, they are motivated exclusively by the experience of real existence in its most empirical sense: the reality of a transpired fact is resolved in the reality of the artistic act - the act of execution in a form. With the force and profound resonance of expression, Bacon's paintings push the effort to comprehend human nature, its concrete form and functioning, and its feelings to the extreme. The starting point for his artistic activity is his own life. In Bacon, the experience of existence is lived through all the senses and powers of the human being and not through the primacy of the eye. On the contrary, this, like the rational intellect, drowns in the ambiguity resulting from the synthetic simultaneity of the senses. To arrive at the image that permits him to grasp something of this ambiguity and make it become reality, assume form, Bacon strikes an extremely hypothetical, daring, and risky course.