Sensationist Portraits
Lola 1912 Alexj von Jawlensky
What is alienus portraiture? Is there an alienual autoportrait? Who can really recognise an extraterrestrial emanation; or an angoisse alien apparition? Who can really recognise an alien apparition? Or, rather, misrecoginise? As there are always already 'aliens among us' which wear all too human heads hiding their reptilian wrinkles, slimy skin, shiny scales and an alteric alienus aura. Extraterrestrial Portraiture positively isn't sentimental Steven Spielberg's schlock, all too human, ET. Extraterrestrial Portraiture arrives as Alien attuned and activated by Swiss surrealist artist Hans Ruedi Giger. H.R. Geiger is guarded about the abject alien he activated to: "The Alien has been my baby so when I was asked to change the creature into a less humanoid beast, I hoped that my decisions would be done without other ideas. I thought, since I got an Oscar for my Alien, it would be me who gave advice on how it would look. When Woodruff and Gillis said they had their own ideas, I was very upset." Giger gave birth to an alien art to an art alien by tearing the head off of the human and now there are no more human heads about only our alien heads ahead.
What is alienus portraiture useful for? As an 'it' it is not useful for anything - 'it' is useful for a nothing - 'it' is useful for a thing: for being a thing in itself as abjected out itself. An alienus portraiture is projected 'out of orbit' : 'it' is not an 'art work' : 'it' does not 'work' : 'it' is always already 'out-of-work' : 'it' is 'out-of-art' : 'it' is 'out-of-joint' : 'it' is idle and asleep - such are alien idols : away waiting awhile as a drifting drooling dasein doing nothing: unemployed and unemployable: a radical 'doing nothing' as a mood 'moon lighting' lingering liquid lava abjected ahead as an arche-arting activated action navigating nebula neutral nearing nerve nevus nevering nothing.
In pressing ahead alienus portraiture forward to its true existence, sensation will arrive at a point at which it sheds its semblance of being burdened with something alien to it, that is only for it and as some sort of other. Alien abpearance as an arche-arting becomes identical with an angoisse ejaculated essence and at just this point the shining of sensation will thereby seep with the scene of sense proper projected ahead and afar as an altaric alienscape portraiture porous propulsion pressing presence preserved. In real reality there is no such 'thing' as an 'alien representation' as art alien is always already an an absentation as an abjection ahead as a projected presentation of the 'thing it self' abjected ahead of itself out of it self as being alien in itself: alien being is art alien abjected ahead as art alien becoming being beheaded. Beheading ahead alienus self portraiture Velázquez and Rembrandt did not represent themselves: make representations of themselves: Velázquez and Rembrandt presented: made presentations: made present projections thrown through an altaric abjected absentation attuning and attaining an activated presencing - pure presence projected - passing the time all the time - ahead of time - as being time becoming the time being for the time being - being in time and out of time - at the same time - being behind the time for a time. Rembrandt and Velázquez - as abjected aleatoric-alétheia alien-artists of being-as-time serve the sensation of time severing the sensation of time as being the being of time all the time not in time all the time out of time.
Velázquez and Rembrandt project and push present the presence of Being in beings as abjected and altaric alien beings - but not as a painting of presence, not as a philosophy of presence - leaving logocentrism leaked - but as a dasein of différance - detoured derailed ahead - as a distant derridian deferment defilement - disjoining decapiatated différance - ahead - as a head - headed floating forward - forging forever fort da daing darling dasein - daringly delivered as an angoisse activated articulted absencing - arriving alive away and ahead - as a head - attained as an angoisse abjected absent past pushed present - presenting pure presence - past projected afar and ahead - at a distance - at a deference - at a différance. Velázquez and Rembrandt present the différance of presence present pressting ahead a head having annihilated representation: Velázquez and Rembrandt do not represent - Velázquez and Rembrandt present.
Velázquez and Rembrandt present the absent present as an abjected dasein dissemblance disseminated dissemenated drenching the sight and the site of the subject stained: severe Velázquez and Rembrandt sever the time of the subject so cannot be seen in time only over a time and not in any old time or for the time being. For Velázquez and Rembrandt serve self portraiture projected for the being time the being of time. For Velázquez and Rembrandt being time is a constant presence constantly serving and severing itself out of time all the time not in time by being time constantly ahead of itself as a head of time for all time and no time for all and for no one. Velázquez and Rembrandt present time for the time being as the sensation of the subject of being-in-time since the sensation of time is always already also subjective as well as absoluted and abjected absolutely. Velázquez and Rembrandt paint present time for the time being for the time of the subject to take time for the time being and the being time. Velázquez and Rembrandt activate and abject the subject of time out of time all the time in time with being time becoming time being.
Velázquez and Rembrandt present the time for the subject as the time for the present: the present past ahead of itself: for Velázquez and Rembrandt time is not represented for time is not a representation: time cannot be represented only sensationed since time is a sensation for the subject attuned and attained as an art alien activation. Attaining absolute time throws thrusts ahead a head of an attuned absolute art alien attained. As for being painters for Velázquez and Rembrandt the painting of time paints the temporality of painting for the time being being the being of time. For Velázquez and Rembrandt the truth of painting is the painting of time as the time of painting out of time with the time of being for the being time. Velázquez and Rembrandt disperse time dispersing dasein ahead of itself dispensing the time of the subjected disseminated a head of itself dissemenated as a decapitated dasein. For Velázquez and Rembrandt Being & Paint present dasein time for a time adrift and ahead as a moving mooding moment where a mood makes a time a severed sensation of time as a mood of time for a time and for a time being. Time is Nothing but a Mooding and the nothing gives times its moods. Time is a Real Thing as Time is a Mood Thing to be in and to be thrown out of: dread derails disperses decapitates the time from the time of the subject. Dread takes the Time out of the Subject: Dread - Anxiety - Boredom - the true sensations of being-thrown-out-of-time - steal and suspend the subject from being-in-time. Velázquez and Rembrandt suspend the presence of the subject by suspending the time being for the subject by presenting the sensation of suspended time painting presence present and abjected ahead as a mooding moment telling the time. For Velázquez and Rembrandt time is a real thing as time is a material mood: time is made manifest by being in a mood and by being thrown from one mood to another mood from one time to another severing time making time a static sensation sometimes. For Velázquez and Rembrandt time-as-mood thing is always already non-linear as time changes moods and cuts itself off of itself as a mood mutates. Velázquez and Rembrandt activate an Eternal Throwing of Time as a Fort Da daseining decapitating the time being ahead of itself for the being time for the being of time. Art alien like Time alien is always already away ahead of being alien for time for time alien for being.
Velásquez paints the allure and allusion of time through the flicker of the
brush which signals each split spunk spilt second thrown through passages of
pure paint: through the fluent flight of the bravura brush the flicker of time
darts, dances, skates, shimmers, and shudders the paint in time with the seeping
sensation of the sitter’s fleeting and flashing sensibility shining through
the fleeting flickers.
As an absolute altaric attunement alienus portraiture is attained and activated as alien abjected and not man made and certainly not created consciously but carried out carved out off Outside of an artist as Ather without being a representational resemblance. As an altaric alienus portraiture - projecting pure presence - precedes pasts postpones - retreating resembling returning retarding representation. As an altaric alienus portraiture cannot be represented only presented because an altaric alienus portraiture is projected ahead and out of the order of representation for nothing can be represented only presented. The nothing is out of order of representation for the nothing is presenting and the nothing at all is presented as an altaric alienus portraiture.
As a meandering memorial mediation altaric alienus portraiture perturbs ahead an aliquid alien head here beheaded from the body being unhinged, unsettling, uncanny, unavailable as an absence attuned as a shuddering shimmering shape shifting sensation of becoming an aura of alien spirit spilt split off from representation for art alien is alien to representation and cannot be represented only presented out in its itness. As always already aliquid, art alien cannot be made available as an object of knowledge as art alien is useless, unavailable, ungraspable. As absolutely abject alteric alienus-self-portraiture is indeed always already an oxymoron orphan object of nauseating non-recognition removed far from the thick moronic memory of man masking the mania of man mimicking the madness of man-making-man initiated in alien's abimage. An altaric-alienus projected portraiture - is instead initiated - as an arche-arting - attuned and attained as an alien action - ahead and behind - being-man-made. Man no longer belongs to Art. Art belongs to Alien. Alien does not Belong. Alien is Away. Art is Away. Art is Alien. Art Alien - as Nonconcetualizable - has no Porper Name - alien to naming - alien to the man that did not make 'it' - alien art is activated and arrived as a dismembered darting dissemenisation jettisoning joissance juices decanting delicious delirious dasein drained delivered dripping dry with weary weepie welter wetness.
As Francis Bacon said in painting a severed self-portrait to René Char: "I took my head as one takes a lump of salt, and literally pulverized it." The pulverised portrait - as a sensation of the severing - removes representation presenting pure decapitated dasein. An altaric alienus portraiture lives in the name of the nameless and in the head of the headless: and we will in the withering and waiting future live without a need for a name or a need for a head. Art begins by beheading being for the time being for the being time becoming behind and ahead of the time being for an alien time after being.
In pushing ahead and pulverizing an alien head as alienus portraiture it has to be always pulsated as a pure presentation not as representation. Art alien is always already pure presentation - not known representation - of the Thing Itself as absolutely abjected out Itself. As alienus portraiture cannot be represented - there is Nothing to represent. So-called 'subjects' as so second hand - are always already representations and not presentation - not present: people are representation and art is presentation. People are not present: people are no longer present: people are re-present: people are representation: Clichés: are always already Clichés of Clichés of Clichés done to death: to 'paint a portrait' is to paint the Cliché: Cézanne and Bacon broke with the Cliché by painting the Sensation of the Thing out Itself by radically forgetting 'how to do it' - how to do a head - how to form a face. For Cézanne, Bacon, Jawlensky and Picasso the real is always already second hand - inauthentic - representation - and never truly 'real' enough. Only art alien is the real thing without being representation - Present by being Absent - by being away and ahead all the time not in time by being behind time ahead of time.
Art is ahead of Man: Art is Presentation: Man is Representation: Amun activated Art as an abimage. Amun - as Art abjected - at source at shaft - as a shooting Semen sauce - serving Sun serenly - bringing Being - birthing being - activating art. Always already Art is ahead of Man: Art precedes Man: Art is Presentation: Man is Representation: And Art made man initiated in Arts Abimage: Amun activated Art and making man as arts abimage. Amun as Art activated - as an Abject Sublime slime Semen sensation - spurts Shining shards - soaking serving soaring Sun. Swallowing spunk Amun activated Art as Amun's Abimage: as 'the hidden one': Art makes Man Disappear: Art is the concealment of Man as Unconcealment. Art made Man and Art unmade Man: Art is the Birth and Death of Man: Art always already survives Man. Alien Art is the murmuring mourning memory of Mans Deaths. Art is the real of Man's unreality: Man is representation: art is presentation: Art makes Man present only in order to make Man absent again, and again, and again, and again.
Always already Art is ahead of Man: Art is Presentation: Man is Representation: Amun activated Art as an abimage. Amun - as Art abjected - at source - at shaft - as a shooting Semen sauce - serving Sun serenely - bringing Being - birthing being - activating art. Always already Art is a Head of Man: Art precedes Man: Art is Presentation: Man is Representation: And Art made man initiated in Arts Abimage: Amun activated Art and making Man made as Arts abimage. Amun as Art activated - as an Abject Sublime slime Semen sensation - spurts Shining shards - soaking serving soaring Sun. Swallowing spunk Amun activated Art as Amun's Abimage and abjected a Head hiding 'the hidden one': Art makes Man Disappear: Art is the Concealment of Man as Unconcealment. Art made Man and Art Unmade Man: Art is the Birth and Death of Man: Art always already survives Man, severs Man. Alien Art is the murmuring mourning memory of Mans Deaths. Art is the real of Man's unreality: Art is Man's only reality. Man is merely a representation: art is presentation: Art makes Man present only in order to make man absent again, and again, and again. Art always already marks the Ends of Man.
The real reason art alien is pure presentation and not second hand second head representation is that 'it' is the real thing before the being of representation being pure presence of the thing in itself ahead of itself as the image of the abject not the image of the object.
Here for Heidegger The Head - as a head ahead of itself - out-of-itself - beheaded before being - is Die Unkopfliche: the realm of the unheady, or the not-at-head - as akin to Heidegger's Die Unheimliche, the realm of the uncanny, the realm of the unhomely - or the not-at-home. That is Die Unkopfliche is always already the thrown familiar foreignness of an alienus portraiture as absolutely abjected: as un-headed, as the un-hinged. The unheadly - as the undeadly - does not allow us to be at head, be at hand, be at home. We cannot get home; we cannot get head. We can get head by being ahead a head by being left behind by forgetting one's head by losing one's head one gets a head. Making head way. Making home way. There's no one at head. There's no one at home. A head. A home.
There's no one at head as there's no one at face: the face is finished: the face is a cliché to be overcome! No one has a face per se: one has a cliché: one wears a cliché: as a well worn cliché the face has no future: presently the face is always already a representation of past representations: the face is fucked: man can no longer face not having a face so man hides in the face of the other who hides in the face of the other who hides in the face of the other ad infinitum. There is no face-to-face relation as there is no face to face.
Alexj von Jawlensky's so-called 'Abstract Heads' from the mid 1920's to the mid 1930's mark the ending of the human and the becoming of the alien image in art and are Great Art in unifying architecture, music, poetry, painting and philosophy. Jawlnesky's 'Abstract Haeds' are attuned only by the correctness of the gaze of the alien eye that has the ability to shine and can sensation the shining: this is not merely mirroring of one shine to another shining that is the image: it is being within the horizon of shining itself shafting out of itself as a glowing Geist gazing grieving through the thrown enigmatic engulfing echo effect as an abjected and as an angoisse attitude and alienus attunement attained as a meandering mesmerising merging memorial murmuring mooding.
Francis Bacon's pork poof portmanteau portraits drip drool leak lamella shoot spunk spill saliva snort snot trail tears sensationing slippery slivery slithery slimy silky soggy sticky squishy surfaces, stubborn stains, smouldering sockets, slit sores. The thrown fucked faces, hollow heads oozed off of boiled Bacon's bones become the thrown raw register excessive eggo externalisation off of the thrown blown body's jewel jew juices which drip drool froth from the thick jew jaw, the thick nigger nose, the thin mean mouth, the thirsty egg eyes leaking lamella, swamp sewer, subconscious sea, shot spunk, slithering spume with all the froth and the foam locked leaking arse about, around armpit the then frozen face, the there hollow hot head. Bacon never paints a whole head, a full-face, rather a hole head: an opening, an open wound, as an open anus, as a flawed face un-unified: the features froth, foam: fuel form leak lamella bleed bone skin surface: there is no ego only ooze doily eggo. For Bacon, the 'beauty of the paint' throws out the eggo ooze of 'the ugly object' opening out as alienualising the thrown thirst alienus 'abject sublime' slime soaking sodden through to the bled 'beautifully ugly' unavailable to the slippery subject of knowledge.
Grit, grain, gap gape, groin gore, drool drips, soiled spunk sliver shots, silver saliva sliver, slither stains, scar, severe and serve, flaw the face, slice the skin surface, the thrown face froth form, the hole head hollowing oozed out, opening out becoming boiled bled bare oozing oils weaving wonderful wet wounds. Bacon inverts time all the time and Rembrandt by painting himself getting younger and younger the older and older he gets: Bacon served himself severed off the bone al la botox. Bacon 'unfaces' the mask revealing the mask behind the face behind the face of the mask of the face in front of the behind of he head in front of the back of the side of the head of the face behind of the mask. Bacon did not paint his own passing, his own facial fluxing running railway tracks which map mark his fuck face of time all the time out of time for bored Bacon was always already an evil old baby throwing tantrums in his pram trying to escape being there.
In Three Studies for Self Portrait 1979 the left panel is painted with a 'Mother of Pearl' opal aura becoming bled an ancient alien botox-baby face forever. Bacon's Study for self Portrait - Triptych (1985-86) was a silky suave streamlined sensation oil of monstrous mis-recognition registering smoothed surfaces lost lines where weak bored Bacon becomes an alluring alien abject bloated botox baby again and again and again.
Looking at herself in a shocking pink poof plastic hand mirror, Bacon bemoaned to Peppiatt, later in her life, lying to herself:
"Do I really look that young? Well, there it is. There's nothing you can do about those things. You're always as old as you are, even if every now and then someone comes along who thinks you're much younger, then of course who's very shocked when you tell them your age. That's just what's called the horror of growing old and having everybody else dying round you like flies. I've got nobody left to paint now except myself. There it is. Even if it's just this old pudding face of mine." (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon Anatomy of an Enigma, Westview Press, 1996.)
Bacon stated to David Sylvester: "I like painting good-looking people because I like good bone structure. I loathe my own face, I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do. It's true to say...One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.' This is what one does oneself." But this is not what Bacon did in his self- portraits: what Bacon saw, imaged, painted was plastic surgery at work. Bacon pondered with the idea of having a face-lift for himself: "...if there was any way of regaining youth, even if it meant an unpleasant operation, I'd be the first to do it..." Michael Peppiatt added: "Having scrutinized the results of face-lifts on several close women friends, he regularly toyed - but only toyed - with the idea of having one done himself." (Peppiatt, Francis Bacon Anatomy of an Enigma, Westview Press, 1996.) Bacon's faces, heads, mugs, stumps are strikingly similar to Jawlensky's faces, heads, meditations with their alien auratic aroma, elliptical eyes, dark discs, flawed features, primordial power. Bacon said to Sylvester: "I mean, appearance is like a continuously floating thing." The face as fort-daing ahead and aback is always already in flux - in flow - forging ahead - a head - forming a face - fast forward - never finished - always already away and abjected - flowing froth forth forever - leaving leaking loitering leftovers left.
Bled Bacon's silent substratum self-portraits throw the severed sensation of our jewel Jawlensky's 'late' leaked floating fleeting melting meditations: being-alien-object-towards-the-no-nothing. Jawlensky's late 'meditations' become pristine prison bars blocking blacking shuttering sensation grid gaps bleeding blackness being beams gleams glowing similar sown sensation initiated in Bacon's blanked black severed self-portraits pulverising the light into the dark violating vision via the violence of darkness for Jawlensky and Bacon the violence of light is the violence of the dark for there is no gaze only glaze the closing down the shutting off of the empirical eye ending so severe sight sealing seen thus the moment and movement of truth is the darkening flash burning being human hollowing out of our eggo eye socket split sensation where waiting wondering wandering concealment craters clearing off of envelope eye lid locked out opening on recoveredness reveil revealing resting while with waiting slowly sleeping seeping sensation through thrown time truth as an alluring awe aura aroma alight ahead at being blacked back brought forth forever flaming froth force fort-da decapitating dasein.
Blanchot terms the fragmentary as: "Language's rupture with itself." For Bacon the fragmentary portraiture is: 'paint's rupture with itself' where the pushed-paint fuses-fractured fragment facets until unifying the thrown (w)hole hollowing out the thrown soggy sodded subject bled bare becoming an alien oozed object wetted which fits over and floods out the sedated subject where the 'beautiful human subject' becomes the 'ugly alien object'. But Bacon's paints portraits actually as frothed fragmentary facets. In Bacon's primordial portraits, hollowed heads, the abject-sublime is the angoisse antagonistic push-pull-paint between the dying 'human subject' and the borning 'alien object': the thrown oozed object leaks lager than the sinking subject wet with slime stuff ejaculating, erupting, engulfing eggo-oily over empty-ego throttling the thrown foreign filtered flayed fuck face forever fresh froth spilling silk sliver silver sperm sensation ooze over outer orbit. Bacon's split-spilt pus-portraits are a Deleuzeian Rhizome: "A rhizome is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning or end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear linear multiplicities with n directions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n-1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes its nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis." (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophréne, Paris 1980). Bacon's headless heads neither begin nor end but begin bled bare at the end of the beginning of the end of being as are always already mutating man meat metamorphoses arriving at atta an angoisse awe aroma archaic alteric Aletheia alien abject again and again after resting reeling as a real revealing through thrown retrieving forever fort daing dasein drifting.
The ground of the face is the open abyss abliss revealing-concealing the mooding mask of the face as the mooding face of the mask. The face is not seen but sensationed: you do not see a face in front of you but sense the face sensationing seeping shining sheening through throwness. Not all human beings have faces or heads but continued bodies which wear their faces for them. Many human beings wear their face on their bodies and their bodies on their faces. Many human beings 'wear' their 'face' on their 'cunt', 'wear' their 'face' on their 'cock', 'wear' their 'face' on their 'arse', 'wear' their 'face' on their 'torso', 'hand', 'foot'. It is therefore, as it were, hardly at all surprising in a 'face-to-face' encounter we are often called: 'cunt', 'prick', 'arse' : our 'public face' is often named via 'face-to-face' via our 'private' body bits. The 'face-to-face' encounter is in fact a 'face-to-body' encounter and a ' body-to-body' encounter. The 'face-to-face' encounter is not exclusively 'human'. Many 'face-to-face' encounters are 'human-to-alien' and 'alien-to-human' and: 'alien-to-alien' always already unseen, unavailable to the 'human'. The 'alien' can 'face' the 'human face' but the 'human' cannot 'face' the 'alien face' for fear of losing 'face' forever. For leaking Levinas the 'face-to-face' raw-relation is not 'a question of perception' but a state of sensation as an electric elect ethical political projection profiling 'face-to-face' as a fort-da-fluxing faking flawing failing flowing feeding fueling frowning frothing forthcoming. Whilst we are all alien and not at all human most still imagine that they are still human at heart at head at here.
An alluring alien face force is instead never now available as being before your yearn in the no-now but thrown through thrown time all the time: the thrown froth face is in the thrown fort-da dispersing dripping drowning off of time all the time. Fresh foam form face froths luminous leaked lather light bringing being bled bare before revealing radiant rawness but born boiling being blinded by great golden gleaming glistening ghosts loitering light loose soft scintillating succulentsaliva slurp skin shining schein sensation soil sown.
In painting portraits Bacon, Jawlensky, Schiele do not use colour as a register of the sensation of the flesh of the 'face' (or the 'body') but as a register of the psyche's shape-shifting altered spot states of the 'head' (and the body) as a memory trace of the ruin of alien being-out-the-world. For Bacon as for Schiele, the head, the face, is (also) always already alive, lurking and leaking from the body itself where the torso takes on the 'face' of the body where the psyche and spirit originally operate and alienally oozes oils from form forever frothed forth. Jawlensky, Bacon and Alien ab-use 'eggisms' - circular-disc-spot sensations - to Nail the Nothing of the Sick Psyche.
In initiating iridescent froth fuel faces, the act of seeing is indeed displaced, for Bacon, Jawlensky, Auerbach and Alien, by the thrown Act of Sensationing where gaze is initiated glaze where vision is division, abvision, sowing suturing splitting spilling slicing off of our empty empirical 'evil eye'. Jawlensky, Bacon, Auerbach and Alien are absolutely housed Heraclitusian Heideggerian in initiating throwing the hollowed head ahead off of itself oiling out off of our orbit as a leaked lightening thrusted thunderbolt blowing being out of sync out of skin out of sky out of eye egging essencing Ereignis.
For Jawlensky, Bacon, Auerbach, and Alien the face of the head, the head of the face, the being of the face, the face of being, cannot be 'shown' ('represented', 'illustrated') only 'shone' ('sensationed') there that is 'shined' there ahead of the head through the throne shimmering and shining of outing initiated infinity into ining orbiting oblivion of becoming Being by breeding darkening as lighting: Dasein darkness opens up the horizon throwing being blank blackness to the bait of Being by excluding, emptying, ejecting, exiting seen seeing vivaciously violating the violence of vision. For Jawlensky, Bacon, Auerbach, and Alien 'seeing' is 'not something human' but something alien as a glazed 'glance' of an Aletheia alien being leaking 'looking' into the face of Alien akin to the Greek Poets and Philosophers presencing of the Gods as an unconcealment.
For Bacon's Self-Portraits and Jawlensky's Meditations, the 'moment of vision' is the 'sensation of division': an alteric aleatoric alétheia abvision apparition where the darkening illuminates the dark light of being as blankness blackness as a clearing cleaning where 'seeing' is not 'believing' but Being being out itself as the opening out of groundless gape gap that there throws being bare blank: Bacon and Jawlensky's 'blanks' - heads without faces; faces without heads are heavily Heideggerian as an apparition sensationed Seinaletheia as the thrown thrust coming to tough presence as an abject absence orbiting out of oozed concealment as an utterly unconcealment being blown through thrown thrusted over out of the head out of the world out of the time as a disclosed dislocated darkness drain as a 'face-lift' leaking left headless hole hollowed hovering hoovering shimmering Zeus shining severed sensation slipping away as a fort-da-face: flawed flown forever violating violent vision delivering dread Dasein darkening draping draining drip dew drops.
In pastelling portraits Degas and Cassatt seep sensation of oily skin shimmering outside illustration indeed both bleed lips wet without literal lines as in Cassatt's Study for the Portrait for a Child (1900) where the leaked lips are moist made up of completely non-illustration arbitrary marks like an exploding rose bur are so 'lipy' unlike fraud Freud who cannot paint lips eyes nose ears outside inane illustration.
An awesome alluring aleatoric alétheia angoisse abjected altaric alienus apparition aura aroma portraiture prods projects punctuates pulsates pulps pulverises sutured psychic shuddering shaking shivering shimmering shining scintillating sparkling splattering spunking smelling snorting sensationing suturing soaking sowing sliding slurping slipping sweating showing splendouring glowing glimmering glaring gleaming glistening glittering dazzling dripping drowsing drooling draining fatiguing flashing flickering fluttering falling frothing foaming fuming flinching flickering leaking luminousing liquidating lightening lingering loitering being born bled bare oozed out of our orbit world womb wound wondering wandering wailing. So sow the thrown wound work of oozed out pulsating prodding primordial portraiture is in to thus reveal recover forgotten frozen altaric alienus aleatoric alétheia apparition awe aura as thrown thunderbolt through first forgetting of our human head through thrown fort-da-frothing and an ending and emptying of the empirical evil eye by becoming bored by Being Alien angoisse as an altaric alienus attuned and attained ancient anxiety arriving again and again and after again after again after again after after again again afar and away always already as all afar all away.
"Half its fucking head's gone!"
Victor Salva, Jeepers Creepers II (2003).
"Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend."
John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925).
"We don't need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different."
Guy Pearce, Memento, 2000, Directed by Christopher Nolan.
"Isn't art an activity that gives things a face?...The true essence of man is presented in his face."
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 1998.
"Its amazing what you can do when you don't have to look at yourself in the mirror anymore."
Kevin Bacon, The Hollow Man, 2000, Directed by Paul Verhoeven.
"One does not get over a passion by portraying it; rather, the passion is over when one portrays it."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
"It's like looking in the mirror only it's not...I want to take his face... off. Eyes, nose, skin, teeth. It's coming off!"
Travolta/Cage, Face/Off, 1997 Directed by John Woo.
"…human face carries a kind of perpetual death …which it is for the painter to save by giving it back its own features."
Antonin Artaud, Portraits et Dessins, Paris 1947.
"How will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany of the other free itself of light?...What language will ever escape it?"
Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay of the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas; University of Chicago, 1978.
"However ugly a face may be, we can discover some beauty in it if we first experience wonder before it and then begin to understand it, too."
Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980).
"The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss...the wide entrance into the depths of the body."
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), Rabelais and His World, 1965.
"There must have been some moment that you had a Face...When are you getting a Face?...The Face is no guarantee of what it represents...Your Face will always let you down...My face has fallen...What is Beautiful comes to us in the image...The Ugly face is more positive than the Beautiful image because there is kind of more stuff there....The Ugly might be better described through a mode of tactility. The Ugly is more like a semiotic reading...a tactile-semiosis..."
Mark Cousins, Socrates the Ugly, Architectural Association, London 20 October 2006.
"It is Bacon's revolutionary treatment of the head that is his greatest overall achievement. No one, not even Picasso, had dared to twist and mould the skull and the face as Bacon does, smearing them, scooping great hollows out of them, turning them inside out, and yet always retaining a likeness which, as in the case especially of George Dyer and Henrietta Moraes, become more compelling and unmistakeable the more violent the distortion."
John Banville, False Friend, Exposed: Francis Bacon's secret photographs, The Sunday Telegraph, 27 February, 2005.
"In a world that is alien, only the other (person) is radically different in welcoming the self, this is the experience of the 'face to face.' The face puts one in question, and by doing so obliges one to respond. The 'face to face' is an experience that disrupts our being...The face, for Levinas, is the way in which the absolute other presents himself, a radical relation between the self and the absolute other. The absolute other that appears through the face of the other, a voice that is heard through the other as a command. By obeying the absolute other one can continue the discourse."
Asaf Friedman, The Architecture of the Face, Levinas' Theory of the Other, 1993.
"Bacon's face was fat, squashed and contorted as if someone had sat on an overripe melon. You see Bacon's face overlaid on all his figures because everything Bacon did was a self-portrait....Bacon painted the adrenaline rush of the nervous system brought on by the obsessive need to express himself."
Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon, Papes et autres figures, September, 1999.
"Your function remains faceless. Nourishing takes place before there are images...you've disappeared, unperceived...until there is only this liquid that flows from the one into the other, and that is nameless...And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other."
Luce Irigaray, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 , 1981.
"The human face is an empty power, a field of death ... after countless thousands of years that the human face has spoken and breathed one still has the impression that it hasn't even begun to say what it is and what it knows."
Antonin Artaud, quote from an exhibition of his portrait drawings, Galerie Pierre, July 1947.
"Modern portrait painting has become a difficult task since the artist who tries to make people see the human being invisible in the present man is apt to make a fool of himself. Since humanism is dead, man is soul-less, he no longer cares if he lives or dies...There will be no portraits left of modern man because he has lost face and is turning back towards the jungle."
Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980).
"The face does not give itself to be seen. It is not a vision. The face is not that which is seen...is not an object of knowledge....it is very difficult to give it [the face] an exact phenomenological description. The phenomenology of the face is very often negative."
Emmanuel Levinas, Interview, 1986.
"There must have been some moment that you had a Face...When are you getting a Face?...The Face is no guarantee of what it represents...Your Face will always let you down...My face has fallen...What is Beautiful comes to us in the image...The Ugly face is more positive than the Beautiful image because there is kind of more stuff there....The Ugly might be better described through a mode of tactility. The Ugly is more like a semiotic reading...a tactile-semiosis..."
Mark Cousins, Socrates the Ugly, Architectural Association, London 20 October 2006.
"We tend to think of the face-to-face exclusively as a relation between human beings....Yet being face-to-face with another has a more distant origin where earth and sky, god and man reach one another, Goethe, and Mörike too, like to use the phrase 'face-to-face with one another' not only with respect to human beings but also with respect to things in the world. Where this prevails, all things are open to one another in their self-concealment; thus one extends itself to the other, and thus all remain themselves; one is over the other as its guardian watching over the other, over it as its veil."
Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, Harper San Franscico, 1971.
"Largely because extraterrestrial portraiture has never (to the best of my knowledge) been either superbly rendered with oils on canvas and put into an expensive gilt frame, or cunningly carved in Carrara marble, or expertly cast in bronze by any recognised modernist master, such ubiquitous imagery will never, of course, be called 'art.'...Another reason why such omnipresent imagery - extraterrestrial portraiture - is never analyzed by art historians is that it can never be manipulated as an 'original'; in fact, it is only made tangible to the public as such as it is repeatedly reproduced in the mass media."
John F. Moffitt, Picturing Extraterrestrials: Alien Images in Modern Mass Culture, Prometheus Books, 2003.
"It is surprising how few other twentieth-century artists there are for
whom portraiture - especially self-portraiture - played the central role it
played for Bacon...That
capacity for piercing the façade and perceiving the confused, sometimes abject,
sometimes heroic, human truth behind was to make Bacon one of the greatest -
possibly even the greatest - portraitist of the Twentieth Century...Bacon
himself came to self-portraiture relatively late, the earliest recognizable
self-portrait being the one he executed in 1958. Looking at the major themes
that characterize the first half of his career, one might reasonably conclude
that Bacon had too many demons (dictators, Popes and other father-figures) to
lay to rest to be able to concentrate on his own image. But, as middle age
approached, Bacon's need for grand, dramatic themes diminished, and he became
increasingly aware that the richest subject matter was to hand in his everyday
life and his immediate entourage. It was at this moment, in the early 1960s,
that portraiture took centre stage in Bacon's work; and as he produced one
astonishingly living image after another of his close friends and lovers, he
began increasingly to submit his own features to the same restlessly destructive
and inventive scrutiny...In his last years, Bacon returned more and more
frequently to his own image. Sardonically, he would explain that since 'all his
friends were dying like flies' around him, he only had his own 'old pudding
face' left to paint. By the 1980s, he was moving towards an ever greater economy
of effect: while his forms grew less distorted, tending towards a new
naturalism, his colours became colder and more translucent, thinned, it seemed,
by the passage of time. Where the backgrounds had been brilliant with
contrasting colour, they now became uniformly black: bright daylight replaced by
the encroaching night. The late self-portraits form a long elegy to the artist's
acute sense of mortality as well as to his desire to pare his images down, with
all superfluity stripped away..."
Michael Peppiatt, All the Pulsations of a Person, Lot Notes; Christie's Post War Sale, June 2006.
"As a portraitist, Francis Bacon is a painter of heads and not of faces, and there is a great difference between the two. For the face is a structured, spatial organization that conceals the head, whereas the head is dependent upon the body, even if it is the point of the body, its culmination. It is not that the head lacks a spirit; but it is a spirit in bodily form, a corporeal and vital breath, an animal spirit. It is the animal spirit of man: a pig-spirit, a buffalo-spirit, a dog-spirit, a bat-spirit... Bacon thus pursues a very peculiar project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover or make it emerge from beneath the face....There is no death's head, according to Bacon. The head is, if anything, boneless. It is not completely soft, but hard. The head is flesh, and the mask itself is not a death-mask, it is a firm block of flesh which separates from the bones: thus the studies for the portrait of Wiliam Blake. The personal head of Bacon is flesh elevated by a very beautiful glance, without eye sockets. This is Bacon's greatest homage to Rembrandt, for having painted a final self-portrait as a block of flesh without orbits. In all of Bacon's work the head-meat relationship goes through an escalation of intensity that makes it more and more intimate...The deformation undergone by the body are also the animal traits of the head. But this is in no way a simple correspondence between animal and facial forms. The face, in effect, has lost its original form due to the operations of cleansing and polishing to which it has been subjected, operations which break up its organisation and allow the head to emerge in its place. The marks or traits of animality do not represent pure animal forms, but are rather the expression of spirits which animate the 'cleansed' parts of the face, which draw out the head, which identify and individualise the head even without a face."
Gilles Deleuze, The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981; Continuum 2003.
"It's very interesting to me, for instance, that the great Rembrandts are his self-portraits and he started them when he was very young and went on painting them until he was a very old man...I think the self-portraits are the greatest thing Rembrandt ever did because they were formally the most extraordinary paintings. He altered painting in a way by the method by which he dealt with himself, and perhaps he felt freer to deal with himself in this totally liberal way...Of course Rembrandt did, like everybody does, change the subject every so often, but there's no reason to ever change the subject. I think that's probably what is so haunting about that small German book where they have put all the Rembrandt self-portraits together, from a young man to the very end of his life. And it's such a remarkable thing, turning page after page to see these things of the one man, absolutely different from beginning to end."
Francis Bacon, 1975 & 1973 from Looking Back at Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 2000.
"The series of Rembrandt's self-portraits, for example, leads us into different domains of sensation. And it is true that painting - and this is especially so with Bacon - proceeds through series. The series of Crucifixions, the series of Popes, the series of portraits, of the mouth that smiles."
Gilles Deleuze, Painting and Sensation, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Flash Art, May 1983.
"No one is identical to himself. Beings have no identity. Faces are masks. Behind the faces that speak to us and to whom we speak we look for the clock work and microscopic springs of souls... Psychoanalysis and history really culminate with the destruction of the I, identifying itself from within... I am as if enclosed in my portrait.... No concept corresponds to the I as a being."
Emmanuel Levinas, The I and the Totality; Thinking-of-the-Other, The Athlone Press, 1998.
"The face sensations in and on me and I am its subconscious. Portraiture does not represent the invisible, it makes invisible. Portraiture has to represent the unrepresentable inscribing initiating instinct sludge slurp subconsciously. When you are painting you have to descend into primeval Chaos; you have to be in a state of anxiety and angoisse as a thrown radical alienation attuning toward an alien Ather."
Alex Alien, School of Francis Bacon, 2004.
"The great portraits of the past always left me with a side-image, as well as a direct image. Every image casts its shadow into the past, and I could never disassociate myself from the great European images of the past - and by 'European' I mean to include Egyptian, even if the geographers wouldn't agree with me."
Francis Bacon, from Francis Bacon, World of Art, John Russell, Thames & Hudson, 1979.
"The face as the desensibilization, the dematerialization of the sense datum, competes the movement, still caught up in the figures of mythological monsters, by which the animal body or half-body let an evanescent expression break through on the face of the human head they bore...The notion of the face…brings us to the notion of meaning prior to my Sinngebung and thus independent of my initiative and my power...the face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense, it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched - for in the visual and tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content."
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, Kluwer, 1981.
"When I experience another's face in the order of representation and expression, I do not experience the face as the exterior of a head any more than I experience it as a surface of representation. The face as representation dominates my experience to the point that the perception of the head as a physical volume, which therefore implies an inside, is repressed. Everything I see is organized around the face as a vehicle of expression. The eyes, the nose, the mouth, the structure of the face are filled with and determined by the phantasy/fact of expression. The experience of the meaning of the face determines the phantasy of what is behind the face. Facial expression seizes possession of a depth which is implied. In reading the surface, I fill out what is behind the surface with the depth of the surface...When I look at you, I do not only imagine that the surface of your face epitomizes an expression; the experience of your face overwhelms any thought of what might lie behind it. The depth of your face exhausts any question of 'behind'. This phantasy is shockingly curtailed by the sight of a facial wound. Suddenly the phantasy of depth is shattered by the perceptual registration that there is a behind to the face and that, far from supporting the experience of depth, it projects the stuff of another order, or disorder. The sight of subcutaneous reality, the sudden, crazy sight of flesh and bone is altogether too much. It seizes my attention because it does not signify, because of its evident character of being too much, too close, too soon. It does not so much undermine as 'overmine' the face and its expressive economy. The face does not collapse; the face is thrown off. The depth of expression is relegated to the surface of a mask. The moment of ugliness, then, is the shattering of the subject's phantasy of what makes up the object, in which the object is permeated by its surface just as a face is, and not that there is a non-signifying interior whose pressure to appear is concealed only by the temporary and mendacious skin of a mask. The trauma, for the subject, is occasioned by the sudden appearance of 'stuff', the stuff which threatens to overwhelm and engulf the subject, and to contaminate the subject with its own lack of meaning."
Mark Cousins, The Ugly, AA Files, Number 29, Summer 1995.
"Appearance remade. Dissolved in drink, prised apart in the unforgiving, acid eye. Appearance reduced. Less and less of even the flesh. From image to image, everything obliterated or taken away. One half a face plucked out, the other left stunned beside a huge curling black cut. Head swinging round, brush-whipped into a new clarity. Themselves and other. The face beneath the flesh. One head axed in two by a crescent of sky-blue light. Then punched into profile with the nosebone gone. Nothing but a clear ear and hair close-plastered on a blob of raging pink. Entire face smeared in a blink. Then an eye blasted, closed up in its murderous setting in the skull. A detail or two left intact. A rose-and-cream muscle. Smile on the skin over the bone. The mouth aglitter. One head broken in a shriek of pleasure-pain, the other hard-death-masked in desire. All the faces, the bewildered heads, closely watched over the years."
Michael Peppiatt, In Francis Bacon's Studio, Art International, No.8, Autumn 1989.
"Levinas's main aim in 'Sensibility and the Face' is to show that although the notion of sensation has been 'somewhat rehabbillitated,' it must always fall short of naming the relation to the face, the ethical relation. Sensation must always participate in the discourse of light which has defined it since Plato. Vision always discerns and receives beings in and from an illuminated space and against the backdrop of a horizon, a horizon which rules out the thought of beings as coming from elsewhere. They come as if from nowhere, as if from out of nothingness."
Paul Davies, The Face and the Caress, Levinas's Ethical Alterations of Sensibility, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, University of California Press, 1993.
"...I am certainly not trying to make a portrait of somebody's soul or psyche or whatever you like to call it. You can only make a portrait of their appearance, but I think that their appearance is deeply linked to their behaviour."
Francis Bacon, 1984, from Looking Back at Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 2000.
"Even in the 1981 Study for Self -Portrait, Bacon complicates his own identity, as his head, detached from a loosened white collar, slips into the enclosing rectangle of a framed canvas and, like Janus, looks backwards and forwards, half of it still fleshy, the other half a black profile like a shadow cast from an interior life. And in the 1982 portrait of Isabel Rawathorne, a long-term friend who, from the 1960s on, posed patiently for the artist, the head is similarly disembodied, fluctuating between the dignity of an ancient cameo, with a gracefully arced neckline, ad the gruesomeness of a dismembered body part, mashed into its background by delicate blue and red stripped patterns that resemble the crushing imprint of automobile tires on human flesh."
Robert Rosenblum, Francis Bacon's Pulp Fictions: Paintings, Marlborough, New York 2002.
"Bacon himself has often suggested that his distortions clear away veils and screens, and reveal his subjects, 'as they really are'. But before we assent to this, we must first go along with Bacon's judgement on his fellow human beings. In this sense,, his approach is the opposite to Sutherland's; Bacon would never let the sitter 'compose his own portrait'...For Bacon, an individuals face is no more than an injured cypher for his own sense of the irredeemable baseness of man."
Peter Fuller, Nature And Raw Flesh; Sutherland versus Bacon, Modern Painters, Issue Number One, 1987.
"He [Bacon] said he thought that painting portraits was the most interesting thing he could ever hope to do: 'If only I could do them...To get the essence without being positive about the actual shapes - that's the difficulty It's so difficult it's almost impossible!'.......the face was hardly recognisable as a face for it was disintegrating before your eyes, suffering from a severe case of elephantiasis: a swollen mass of raw meat and fatty tissues. The nose spread in many directions like a polyp but sagged finally over one cheek The mouth looked like a painful boil about to burst..."
Francis Bacon's portrait of Beaton, Self-Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton.
"Well, now, what personally I would like to do would be, for instance, to make portraits which were portraits but came out of things which really had nothing to do with what is called the illustrational facts of the image; they would be made differently, and yet they would give the appearance. To me, the mystery of painting today is how appearance can be made. I know it can be illustrated, I know it can be photographed. But how can this thing be made so that you catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the making? It's an illogical method of making, an illogical way of attempting to make what one hopes will be a logical outcome - in the sense that one hopes one will be able to suddenly make the thing there in a totally illogical way but that it will be totally real and, in the case of a portrait, recognizable as a person."
Francis Bacon, from The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.
"In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains or returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and a figuration is eclipsed. The figure, the face, then sees its visibility being eaten away; loses its integrity without disintegrating... For one can just as well read pictures of ruins as figures of a portrait, indeed, of a self-portrait...The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday...The traits of a self-portrait are also those of a fascinated hunter. The staring eye always resembles an eye of the blind, sometimes the eye of the dead, at that precise moment when mourning begins: it is still open, a pious hand should soon come to close it; it would recall a portrait of the dying... Seeing the seeing and not the visible, is seeing nothing. This seeing eye sees itself blind."
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
"Now you are posing the problem: 'What is there in the face?' In my analysis, the Face is definitely not a plastic form like a portrait; the relation to the Face is both the relation to the absolutely weak - to what is absolutely exposed, what is bare and destitute, the relation with bareness and consequently with what is alone and can undergo the supreme isolation we call death - and there is, consequently, in the Face of the Other always the death of the Other and thus, in some way, an incitement to murder, the temptation to go to the extreme, to completely neglect the other..."
Emmanuel Levinas, Philosophy, Justice and Love, Thinking-Of-The-Other, Athlone Press London, 1998.
"The deformation of figures and human faces in modern sculpture and paintings are reminiscent prima vista of archaic works in which the cultic replication of people was either not intended or impossible to achieve with the techniques available But it makes a world of difference whether art, having once achieved the power of replication, negates it, as the word deformation replies, or if this power has yet to be gained; for aesthetics the difference is greater than the similarity. It is hard to imagine that art, having once experienced the heteronomy of portrayal, would again forget it and return to what it determinately and intentionally negated. "
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997.
"To the point, in fact, at which the face as we know it would disappear altogether in the jewelled slime of the paint, leaving behind it an eye socket, or the deep cave of a nostril, or an irreducible patch of hair, as tokens that somewhere among the strong-willed chromatic smearing a named individual was commemorated. No questions, here, of setting the scene: we are at a dentist's distance from eyes, nose, mouth and teeth, and the rest of the world is blocked out."
John Russell, from Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times, Andrew Sinclair, Crown Publishers, 1993.
"The only real thing now in portraiture is to make not just an illustration of the person but to make an image of them. People talk, for instance, of giving a person's character, but I don't think portraits very often do that...I always hope to distort into reality...I'd like to make a marvelous image which also looked like the person, if I could do it. I have done one... perhaps one or two have been successful. I did a set of three of Muriel. They were very deformed, but I think they were deformed into appearance. For instance, this one of Muriel, who was a very great friend of mine. Well, people hate this thing. But I find that this portrait of Muriel is very, very tender and happens to be very like her."
Francis Bacon interview with Joshua Gilder, "I think about Death Every Day", Flash Art, May 1983.
"Bacon was obsessed by appearance, his own most of all, and he believed that homosexuals possessed an unusually keen eye for the way people looked. 'Homosexuals become more and more impossible with age', he remarked, ' because they are obsessed with the physique. They simply never stop looking at the body, all of it, the whole time, and pulling it to pieces. That's why if ever I wanted to know what someone really looks like, I've always asked a queer. They're ruthless and precise.' Bacon's portraits, unlike Giacometti's, often uncannily resemble their subjects - prove his point abundantly."
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Westview Press, 1997.
"It is hard to think of anyone who painted more self-portraits. Bacon painted dozens, mostly small canvases of his head. Usually three are put together to form a triptych; sometimes one appears as a solo canvas or as a nit in a triptych along with other peoples' heads...Bacon painted from photographs and realised a substantial number of full-length self-portraits. Beginning in 1956 - with an image Quasimodo-like in face and figure - he produced seventeen. That count includes the Sleeping Figure of 1974 painted from a photograph of him stretched out on a hospital bed. It also includes three items which in fact constitute Study for self Portrait - Triptych, 1985-86. This has a look of having been undertaken as a kind of summa of all the artist's activity as a self-portraitist. Such enterprises usually fail. This work seems to me not only Bacon's supreme achievement in self-portraiture but the finest thing he did during the last fifteen years of his life. It is in the line of those self-portraits by old artists which are merciless acts of self-recognition. and it has a kind of grandeur which recalls the unaffected, easygoing grandeur that bacon had as a man."
David Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, Hayward Gallery, University of California Press, 1998.
"Deleuze notes how the primacy of blue and red in Bacon's faces serves as a reminder of the fleshy, meaty aspect of the face, but in this way the colors open up the figure to temporality, becoming flesh in mutation.. As Deleuze puts it, 'color-structure gives way to color-force; because each dominant, each broken tone indicates the immediate exercise of a force upon a corresponding zone of the body or the head, it renders force immediately visible.'..."
Dana Polan, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (1994).
"Bacon is extraordinarily intelligent but he is a gambler whose appetite for chance plays upon the insecurity of his sense of form....He seems to encounter flesh agglutinated haphazard on gristle rather than on bone...He understands and can gamble on the human head as no artist since Picasso has understood it. Indeed it is a measure of his mastery that he alone, since Picasso, can totally disorientate the formal elements which comprise a portrait head, without losing the likeness."
Michael Ayrton, from Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times, Andrew Sinclair, Crown Publishers, 1993.
"T. W. Adorno has written that 'the truth of works of art hinges on whether or not they succeed, in accordance with their inner necessity, to absorb the non-conceptual and contingent. For there purposeless, which is illusion.' Bacon's paintings stretch the general problematic of portraiture to its limits, forcing the recognition that the unrecognizable, contingent personhood of the portrayed can never be truly and completely grasped in and through paint...As if in spite, Bacon's portraits seek to destroy the vestige of personhood available in the everyday appearance of the figure by assimilating it entirely into painterliness."
Donald Kuspit, Hysterical Painting, Art Forum, January, 1986.
"Rather than effortlessly and swiftly creating a totality, the genius may incorporate alien objects into the structure of a work, elements that would defeat a lesser artist, in whose hands the whole would break down into a ridiculous collection of incompatible fragments. The genius is able, indeed needs to, put himself against a seemingly impossible - to mould individual, inappropriate elements into a final whole. The greater the difficulty, the greater the final impression that the totality makes. In this sense the ugly is part of the power of genius...Ugliness can deform a work, but it ca also strengthen it. For the stronger the totality of a work of art, the more it has had to overcome those elements within itself that oppose its unification."
Mark Cousins, The Ugly, AA Files, Number 28, Autumn, 1994.
"I've done a lot of self-portraits, really because people have been dying around me like flies and I've had nobody else left to paint but myself... But I don't know whether it would be possible to to do a portrait of somebody just by making a gesture of them. So far it seems that if you are doing a portrait you have to record the face. But with the face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them.....to do it in a much more intense and curtailed way. It has to have the intensity of...you can cal it sophisticated simplicity. And I don't mean the kind of simplicity Cycladic sculpture has, which simplifies into banality, but the kind Egyptian sculpture has, which simplifies into reality. You have to abbreviate into intensity.....the painter has to be more and more inventive. He has to re-invent realism. He has to wash the realism back onto the nervous system by his invention, because there isn't such a thing in painting any longer as natural realism...Because I'm always hoping to deform people into appearance; I can't paint them literally."
Francis Bacon from, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.
"Alien Portraiture has to be initiated outside illustration, outside the ego opening the eggo breaking being open. Absolute alterity of alien identity is always already alien being Being-ahead-of-itself; being Beheaded-of-itself mimicing Omeric masks and Egyptian heads which are not a closing, a concealing, a covering over but an opening up where the mask becomes the shell of sensation revealing the eggsistence of the alien-eggo leaking lamella. Alien Portraiture is the dis-identification with the (post) human subject initiating the awe-inspiring alien object. Alien Art essentially erases the memory and narrative of being human to alien being."
Alex Alien in conversation with April Hunter, 2003.
"When Egon Schiele encircles the areola of a breast or the labia of the sexual organ with with red, and when he paints a face by juxtaposing carmine, green and blue, he is doing something more than just illustrating. He is forging a link with a very ancient habitus which made use of cosmetics to enhance the erectile qualities of certain parts of the body and to underline the the sacred aspects of sexuality...Schiele paints the face as though it were bruised flesh, a morbidezza of vibrant suppleness and death, attraction and vulnerability, desire and fear."
Jean Clair, Restoring the Paint-Flesh Ritual, Art International, 1, Autumn 1987.
"I particularly want to get rid of the portrait Degas made of me which is hanging in the room beside the drawing room (my studio)...I don't want to leave this portrait by Degas to my family as one of me. I t has some qualities as a work of art but it is so painful and represents me as such a repugnant person that I would not want anyone to know that I posed for it... If you think my portrait saleable I should like it sold to a foreigner and particularly that my name not be attached to it."
Mary Cassatt in a letter to Durand-Ruel, 1912.
"A great work of art is like a great shock... Human faces are for me only suggestions to see something else in them-the life of colour, seized with a lover's passion...The artist expresses only what he has within himself, not what he sees with his eyes... Drawing well does not mean drawing 'correctly'...The artist does not create what exists in nature nor even what might exist in nature. Nature serves him only as a key to the organ in his soul, metaphorically speaking..."
Alexj von Jawlensky
(1864-1941).
"His best work, on the evidence of the Washington show, are the portraits he painted, mostly in the '60s, of friends. It seems to me, although it may be surprising, that Bacon paints women better than men; that may say something about the kind of men he paints, but possibly has to do with a greater detachment and curiosity on his part."
Peter Jenkins, Francis Bacon at Eighty, Modern Painters, Volume 2, Number 4, Winter 1989/1990.
"...'Who can I tear to pieces, if not my friends?' is a favourite maxim of Bacon's, and he lives up to it. When he paints portraits, as he does more and more, it is his friends, once again, who come under scrutiny: 'If they were not my friends, I could not do such violence to them.' This violence, however, is perpetrated in absentia - since he paints his portraits most usually from memory, and from photographs, and in general from anything except the actual living and sitting model."
John Russell, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, 1971.
"When artists paint a portrait they're generally painting something which is very much more revealing of themselves than the sitter...I don't think it matters that a portrait should be almost unrecognisable, but when you go to the great portraits of the past how are you ever to know that they looked vaguely like the people? 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 he kings died. they took out his name and put the name of the next one on the same portrait...If you take the late Rembrandt paintings - he was perhaps the greatest, in a sense, action painter. Because if you take the very late Rembrandt self-portraits you'll find, if you look carefully at them, that there's no mouth, there's no nose, there's no eye-socket, but the thing is that he made a very great image..."
Francis Bacon in conversation with Daniel Farson from The Art Game, 27th August, 1958.
"Since the 'sixties, the painting is the torture. The scale is often epic, but portraiture is always at the centre, because it states, in its most radical terms, the contradiction between the autonomy o the paint and the identity of the subject, corralled, attacked from several sides at once. The light is switched on suddenly, to catch reality by surprise. The contortion characteristic of Bacon's forms is a hanging on to a quarry that tries frantically to escape. There ensures a seesaw struggle in which writhing pigment achieves a succession of brief and partial triumphs: those moments when we forget it because it has suddenly become, with a kind of savage presence, a foot, an ashtray, a cheekbone, a knee clasped in that inimitable British way. And at once the image dissolves into brush-strokes. Thus painting can be said, in Bacon's words, 'to be and not to be'..."
Pierre Schneider.
"In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person. It's why portrait painting is so fascinating and so difficult. Most people go to the most academic painters when they want to have their portraits made because for some reason they prefer a sort of colour photograph of themselves instead of thinking of having themselves really trapped and caught...It's a very odd thing about portraiture that people have an inbuilt idea of what they look like or what they want to look like. If you deviate from that, they don't like it...Of course one does put in such things as ears and eyes. But then one would like to put them in as irrationally as possible. And the only reason for this irrationality is that, if it does come about, it brings the force of the image over very much more strongly than if one just sat down and illustrated the appearance, which of course millions of art students all over the world can do...I can quite easily sit down and make what is called a literal portrait of you. So what I'm disrupting all the time is this literalness, because I find it uninteresting."
Francis Bacon, from The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.
"Because I very much admire Matthew Smith, I am delighted to have been asked to write something about him, although I know I will not be able to do him justice. He seems to me to be one of the very few English painters since Constable or Turner to be concerned with painting - that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable . Painting in this sense tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa. Here the brush-stroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in. Consequently, every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance - mysterious because the very substance of the paint, when used in this way, can make such a direct assault upon the nervous system: continuous because the medium is so fluid and subtle that every change that is made loses what is already there in the hope of making a fresh gain. I think painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down, and in this game of chance Matthew Smith seems to have the gods on his side."
Francis Bacon, Matthew Smith - A Painter's Tribute, The Tate Gallery, 1953.
"There is no death's head, according to Bacon. The head is, if anything, boneless. It is not completely soft, but hard. The head is flesh, and the mask itself is not a death-mask, it is a firm block of flesh which separates from the bones: thus the studies for the portrait of Wiliam Blake. The personal head of Bacon is flesh elevated by a very beautiful glance, without eyesockets. This is Bacon's greatest homage to Rembrandt, for having painted a final self-portrait as a block of flesh without orbits. In all of Bacon's work the head-meat relationship goes through an escalation of intensity that makes it more and more intimate...The deformation undergone by the body are also the animal traits of the head. But this is in no way a simple correspondence between animal and facial forms. The face, in effect, has lost its original form due to the operations of cleansing and polishing to which it has been subjected, operations which break up its organisation and allow the head to emerge in its place. The marks or traits of animality do not represent pure animal forms, but are rather the expression of spirits which animate the 'cleansed' parts of the face, which draw out the head, which identify and individualise the head even without a face."
Gilles Deleuze, The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981.
"The feeling of being an outcast never leaves him. In one of his letters to his mother (Letter 612) he writes of a self-portrait as making him, a cosmopolitan, appear like one of the peasants of Zundert - like Toon or Piet Prins. In his letters about one or another of the self-portraits on which he happens to be working, an almost sarcastic tone creeps into his description of himself, particularly when he is writing to his sister, Willemien. He never spares himself. Almost deliberately he inflicts pain upon himself by emphasizing the uglier aspects of his outward appearance (Letter W7, 1888). He compares himself to those jewellers, themselves almost always old and ugly, who are experts in the handling of beautiful and precious stones. In the same letter he sys that as he grows uglier, poorer, more ill-tempered and more unhealthy, so he would like o balance all this with the splendour of his colour and the excellence of his composition. No aspect of his decay escapes his merciless eye.
Dr. A.M. Hammacher, Van Gogh looks at himself, Van Gogh Self Portraits, Marlborough Fine Art, October 1980.
"I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise...Ah! portraiture, portraiture with the thoughts, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.....What fascinates me much, much more than anything else in my métier is the portrait, the modern portrait...I should like to do portraits which will appear as revelations to people in 100 years time....I should like to paint portraits that will strike people a hundred years from now like visionary apparitions. But I am not trying to achieve this by means of photographic similitude; rather, by means of passionate expression, using our modern knowledge of colour and our contemporary sense of colour as a means of expression and a way of heightening character."
Vincent van Gogh, September 1888, 1890, and Letter W22.
"A madman, van Gogh? Let someone who once knew how to look at a human face look at van Gogh's self-portrait, I am thinking of the one in a soft hat. Painted by van Gogh the extra-lucid, this redheaded butcher's face which inspects and spies on us, which also scrutinizes us with a glowering eye. I know of no psychiatrist who could scrutinize a man's face with such overwhelming force or so dissect its inviolable psychology as at a carving board."
Antonin Artuad, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, 1947.
"Rembrandt certainly. The self-portraits from the end of his life are superb. He had done others earlier, but the later works are even more beautiful. The way in which it's always Rembrandt that you see, in an image which changes each time, is really astonishing, magnificent...I'm very fond of certain portraits by Ingres...For me, Van Gogh is the greatest. He really did find a new way of depicting reality, even for the simplest things, and that method wasn't realist, but was much more powerful than simple realism...At the moment I would like to do a portrait of someone I know, but I haven't the faintest idea of how to go about it. That's always my problem. I always think that i won't know how to do it, then along comes that encounter between my work and the act of painting, the accidents of painting, and then the picture emerges. I'm hardly ever pleased with it, but sometimes, when there is a happy combination of accidents and will, it can be satisfying."
Francis Bacon: In conversation with Michael Archimbaud, Phaidon, 1993.
Portrait of Juan de Pareja 1650 Diego Velázquez
Self Portrait 1642 Rembrandt Van Rijn
Jean-Louis de Roll-Montpellier Hyacinthe Rigaud 1659-1743
Joachim Gasquet 1896 Paul Cezanne
Portrait of William Charles Colyear Sir Joshua Reynolds
Portrait of R. J. Sainsbury 1955 Francis Bacon
The Young Rembrandt as Democrates Rembrandt
Self Portrait Saint Remey September 1889 Van Gogh
Selbstporträt mit erhobener Hand 1920 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff