Art Gallery of Alex Alien


Ontological Drool Self-Portrait (1981)	Shape-Shifting Reptilian (1981)	Ontic-Slime Self-Portrait (1981)
"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.


Ontologically Transparent 1 Self-Portrait (1981)	Headless Female Form (1980)	Ontologically Transparent 2 Self-Portrait (1981)
"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.


Alien-Being-towards-death (1979)	Shape-Shifting-Alien Self-Portrait (1981)	The Goat -Woman (1979)
"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.*


Triptych 1 (1981)	Triptych 2 (1981)	Triptych 3 (1981)
"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." *Francis Bacon in conversation with William Burroughs, Arena, BBC 1986.*


Punk (1981)	Punk (1981)	Punk (1981)
"How are we ever to know whether the pharaohs looked like that? In fact I believe it was quite a well-known thing at the time of the great Egyptian art that when one of the kings died, they took out his name and put the name of the next one on to the same portrait." *Francis Bacon, The Art Game, with Daniel Farson, Rediffusion Television, 27 August 1958.*

Wired-Self -Portrait(1981)	Snide-Self-Portrait (1981)	Sick-Self-Portrait (1981)
"But maybe at the beginning, I painted to be loved…yes, that’s certainly right. It’s so nice being loved. Now I don’t give a toss, I’m old. At the same time it gives you such pleasure if people like what you do. Today I paint very little, although I do paint in the morning because I’m unable to stop; or I paint when I’m in love..." *Francis Bacon, The Last Interview 1991 - 92; The Art Newspaper, June 2003.*


Self-Torso (2000)	Self-Torso (2000)	Self-Torso (2000)
"In some curious way, although I think of Egyptian art as among the greatest realistic art, I think the way Giacommrtti brings in the influence of Egyptian art detracts from his sculpture, because, whereas in Egyptian art the style had an absolute reason, I feel when it's used in the way Giacommetti used it, it's used almost as a conceit." *Francis Bacon, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, T & H, 2000.*


Self-Alien-Portrait (2000)	Non-Self-Portrait (2000)	Ontic-Slime Self-Portrait (2000)
"Bacon loved extremes: to paint by day and gamble by night kept him in the state of nervous tension that enabled him constantly to push back the boundaries. Only by living and working on the edge, he believed, could he go far enough to innovate; or as he himself put it, 'you have to go too fat to go far enough - only then can you hope to break the mould and make something new.' ... Deliberately and persistently breaking the rules in life as in art, Bacon also held regular gambling sessions in the studio." Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, Yale University Press, 2006.


Fractured Face Self-Portrait (2000)	Half-Man-Half-Alien (2000)	Face-Off Self-Portrait (2000)
"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.*


Self -Portrait (1980)	Slither-Self-Portrait (2000)	Slither-Self-Portrait (2000)
"Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint. In 1929 I saw some completely revolutionary pieces, Le baiser and Les baigneuses. The figures are organic. They were my inspiration in The Crucifixion. Picasso was the first person to produce figurative paintings which overturned the rules of appearance." *Francis Bacon, The Last Interview: Francis Giacobetti, The Art Newspaper, June 2003.*


Slime-Self-Portrait (1999)	Becoming Alien Self-Portrait (1999)	Alien-Self-Portrait (2000)
"I look at a chop on a plate, and it means death to me. I would like some day to trap a moment of life in its full violence, its full beauty. That would be the ultimate painting." *Francis Bacon, Distorting into Reality, Time, June 8th, 1962.*


Self-Body-Portrait (1981)	Alien-Self-Body-Portrait (2000)	Self-Torso-Portrait (1999)
"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,* Michael Peppiatt, 1996.**


Soiled-Self-Portrait (1980)	Alien-Self-Portrait (2000)	Liquid-Self-Portrait (1980)
"I do think that Egyptian art is the greatest thing that has happened so far...The whole thing has become so boring and bourgeois. Art is just a way now of making money." *Bacon interview with Peppiatt, Art International, Autumn 1989.*


Self-Torso-Portrait with Liquid Leaking Head (20000	Reptile Slit-Head self-portrait (2000)	Razor-Reptile Self-Portrait (2000)
"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, Francis Bacon: Taking Reality by Surprise, C Domino, 1997.*


Being-There Self-Portrait (1999)	Fused-Self-Portrait (1999)	Early Self-Portrait (1979)
"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, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson.*


Being Nearly Reptile Self-Portrait (1999)	Shape-Shifting-Alien-Self-Portrait (2000)	Rembrandt-Reptile Self-Portrait (1999)
" "If you go into one of those big butcher's shops, especially Harrods - it is not to do with mortality like lots of people think, but it's to do with the colour of meat. The colour of meat is so powerful, so beautiful really. People ask me why mt pictures have this feeling of rawness and mortality. If you think of a nude, if you think of anything going on around you, think how raw it all is. How can you make anything more raw than that?" *Francis Bacon, Carcasses and crucifixes, The Times, Monday May 20, 1985.*


Only-Half-Human Self-Portrait (1999)	Auto-Alien Self-Portrait (2000)	Face-Off 2 Self portrait (1999)
"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, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson.*


Face-Off 1 (1999)	Alien-Self-Portrait (2000)	Face-Off 2 (1999)
"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, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson.*


Shape-Shifting Reptilian Self-Portrait (1981)	Alien-Self-Portrait Hybrid (1980)	Alien-Self-Portrait Hybrid (1980)


Onto Drool (2000)	Onto Ooze (2001)	Onto Drool (2001)
"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." *Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma, Michael Peppiatt.*


Soggy Slime Self Portrait (2000)	Soaked Self Portrait (2000)	Severed Self Portrait (2000)
"My impulse is my life ... My impulse is that I am an old man, but I am profoundly optimistic about nothing: I can be: just existing, for a moment, existing today makes me optimistic: nothing: I'm optimistic about nothing , I am just born with that kind of optimistic nature. I am just optimistic about nothing ... I am interested in reality..." *Francis Bacon, The South Bank Show, ITV 1985.*


Reclining Alien Self Portrait (2000)		Auto Alien Self Portrait (2000)
"Every image casts its shadow into the past, and I could never dissociate myself from the great European images of the past and by 'European' I mean to include Egyptian." *Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon,* John Russell, Thames & Hudson, 1971.**