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Ontological Drool Self-Portrait
(1981)
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Shape-Shifting Reptilian (1981)
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Ontic-Slime Self-Portrait (1981)
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"Thinking in primitive conditions (pre-organic) is the crystallization of forms, as in the case of crystal. In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new material into old schemes, making equal what is new." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. |
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Ontologically Transparent 1 Self-Portrait (1981)
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Headless female form (1980)
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Ontologically Transparent 2 Self-Portrait (1981)
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"A fact, a work is eloquent in a new way
for every age and every new type of man. History always enunciates
new truths." Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power.
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Alien-Being-towards-death (1979)
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Shape-Shifting-Alien Self-Portrait (1981)
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The Goat -Woman (1979)
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"Man is beast and superbeast; the higher man
is inhuman and superhuman: these belong together. Terribleness and
greatness belong together: let us not deceive ourselves."
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Will to Power.
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Triptych 1 (1981)
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Triptych 2 (1981)
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Triptych 3 (1981)
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Allen Ginsberg on Francis Bacon's painting method:" He said he did it with a chance brushstroke that looked in the magic-a fortuitous thing that he couldn't predict or orchestrate". "I don't know if critics of literature are the idiots that critics of painting are in this country, because they're the biggest idiots that exist. They know absolutely fuck all about it to begin with. They've got no instinct about it, they've just got theories." Bacon in conversation with Burroughs, Arena, BBC 1986.
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Punk (1981)
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Punk (1981)
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Punk (1981)
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"Very few people find
their real instincts. Every now and then there's an artist who does
and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of
life. But it's very rare you have to be able to be really free to
find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints.
After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one may
as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant,
even if it means becoming brilliant fool like me and having the
kind of disastrous life that i have had. That is it."
Francis Bacon, from Francis
Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, 1996.
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Wired-Self -Portrait(1981)
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Snide-Self-Portrait (1981)
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Sick-Self-Portrait (1981)
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"Perhaps, at its deepest level, realism
is always a subjective thing. When I see grass, I sometimes want
to pull up a clump and simply paint it on the canvas. But of course
that would not work, and we need to invent the techniques by which
reality can be conveyed to our nervous system without losing the
objectivity of the thing portrayed."
Letter to Michel Leiris
from Francis Bacon.
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Self-Torso (2000)
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Self-Torso (2000)
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Self-Torso (2000)
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" My paintings are, if you like, a record of this
distortion...Abstract art is free fancy about nothing. nothing
comes from nothing. One needs the specific images to unlock the
deeper sensations, and the mystery of accident and intuition
to create the particular. Now I want to do portraits more than
anything else, because they can be done in a way outside
illustration. It is a gamble composed of luck, intuition and
order. Real art is always ordered no matter how much has been
given by chance."
Francis Bacon
in conversation with Michael Peppiatt, 1963.
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Self-Alien-Portrait (2000)
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Non-Self-Portrait (2000)
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Ontic-Slime Self-Portrait (2000)
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"It's like looking into a mirror only
it's not... When this is over I want you to take
this face and burn it...You want to take his face off. Eyes, Nose,
Mouth off."
From the Gage/Travolta film
Face-Off.
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Not Feeling Myself (2000)
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Half-Man-Half-Alien (2000)
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Face-Off Self-Portrait (2000)
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"Half monster, half human, Bacon's creatures are frozen not
in a pose or image, but in time itself. - time as a continuous
phenomenon, a dimension that is a more essential part of reality
than mere appearance. The challenge for the artist, therefore, is
not to make visible a detached moment of general time, a story,
anecdote or piece of narrative, but to demonstrate time itself as a
continuum."
Christophe Domino, Francis Bacon: Taking Reality by Surprise, 1997. |
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Self -Portrait (1980)
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Slither-Self-Portrait
(2000)
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Slither-Self-Portrait (2000)
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"The existential-ontological
constitution of Dasein's totality is grounded in temporality.
Hence the ecstatical projection of Being must be made possible by
some primordial way in which ecstatical temporality temporalizes.
How is this mode of the temporalizing of temporality to be
Interpreted? Is there a way which leads from primordial time
to the meaning of Being? Does time itself manifest
itself as the horizon of Being?"
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time.
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Slime-Self-Portrait (1999)
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Becoming Alien Self-Portrait (1999)
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Alien-Self-Portrait (2000)
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"Falling Being-in-the-world is not only
tempting and tranquilizing; it is at the same time alienating.
Yet this alienation cannot mean that Dasein gets factically torn
away from itself. on the contrary, this alienation drives it into
a kind of Being which borders on the most exaggerated
'self-dissection', tempting itself with all possiblities of
explanation, so that the very 'characterologies' and 'typologies'
which it has brought about are themselves already becoming
something that cannot be surveyed at a glance".
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time.
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Self-Body-Portrait (1981)
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Alien-Self-Body-Portrait (2000)
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Self-Torso-Portrait (1999)
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"I myself think you have to break
technique, break tradition, to do something really new. You always
go back into tradition, but you have to break it and
reinvent it first.."
Francis Bacon,
Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma
by
Michael Peppiatt, 1996.
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Soiled-Self-Portrait (1980)
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Alien-Self-Portrait (2000)
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Liquid-Self-Portrait (1980)
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"The whole thing has become so boring
and bourgeois. Art is just a way now of making money."
Bacon interviewed in Art International, Autumn 1989, Paris. |
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Self-Torso-Portrait with Liquid Leaking Head (20000
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Reptile Slit-Head self-portrait (2000)
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Razor-Reptile Self-Portrait (2000)
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"I do, of course, work very more by chance now than I did
when I was young. For instance, I throw an awful lot of paint onto
things, and I don't know what's going to happen... I throw it with
my hands. I just squeeze it into my hand and throw it on".
Francis Bacon, from Taking Reality by Surprise, C Domino, 1997. |
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Being-There Self-Portrait (1999)
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Fused-Self-Portrait (1999)
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Early Self-Portrait (1979)
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"Great art has
always returned people to life more violently. And they appreciate
life in a more intense way - abstract art is a form of pattern
making...For me abstract art can be nothing but decoration because
there is nothing to anchor it except its artistic allure".
Francis
Bacon, from The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
by Daniel Farson.
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Being Nearly Reptile Self-Portrait (1999)
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Shape-Shifting-Alien-Self-Portrait (2000)
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Rembrandt-Reptile Self-Portrait (1999)
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"All I want
to do is distort reality of the human figure into reality...You
know, the trouble with Lucian's work
is that it's realistic without being real."
Francis Bacon talking to
Daniel Farson about Lucian Freud.
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Only-Half-Human Self-Portrait (1999)
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Auto-Alien Self-Portrait (2000)
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Face-Off 2 Self portrait (1999)
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"Instinct arises
out of that whole unconscious sea inside us...I just work as
closely to my nerves as I can, and as I'm bound up closely in my
world today, perhaps it does reflect savage tensions and vacuous
spaces...Nietzsche forecast our future for us...he told us it's
all so meaningless we might as well by extraordinary."
Francis Bacon from The
Gilded Gutter life of Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson.
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Face-Off 1 (1999)
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Alien-Self-Portrait (2000)
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Face-Off 2 (1999)
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"It's only due to your own nervous
system that you can paint at all...so the thing is, how can I draw
one more veil away from life and present what is called the living
sensation more nearly on the nervous system and more
violently?"
Francis Bacon from The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson.
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Shape-Shifting Reptilian Self-Portrait (1981)
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Alien-Self-Portrait
Hybrid (1980)
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Alien-Self-Portrait Hybrid (1980)
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