Francis Bacon - Man and Beast
Royal Academy of Arts, London
29.01. - 17.04.2022
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/francis-bacon
Royal Academy of Arts, London
29.01. - 17.04.2022
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/francis-bacon
05/05/2022
written by:
Javier Montero Cubero
@javieeermontero
To assist to this exhibition was to assist to a funeral, to the espectacle of a descomposing body or a soul reaching nothingness.
As the title says, the main theme of the exhibition is supossed to be the correlation between human beings and the other animals that populate this planet. But, more than a mirror pointing directly to our primal instincts I found a quite raw approach to the act of dying.
One could say that death comes to us in many different ways. Through mental illness, sadness, the lost of beloved ones, despair, solitude and so on, so on. There’s more ways of meeting the reaper than with her last dance.
Bacon’s artwork expresses perfectly the pain of being, of exist. When life treats you bad it hurts, sometimes it even takes pieces of you and it sends them to oblivion. But when life treats you good, with love and care, it hurts too, because we know it wont last forever, because we don’t understand the meaning behind. And with this problem is where the so called beasts interfere. Being a perfect match between the aesthetic interests of Bacon and his need to explain this old as time feeling in a primary and direct way.
The repertory of paintings goes from body horror to existencial pain. For the body horrors the mix between animal features and human features it’s perfect to portray physical pain through a primary lens. The silenced pain of a deer in a hunting trap left to die it’s not so different from the pain of a man being crucified. The animal features help to erase the barriers of our human bodies to express all the pain we can feel inside.
Full of abstractions, the paintings show us dissappearing persons under a mask of fear, age or delusion, people being trap in a circle of pain similar to the stadiums where bull fights are celebrated. An animal in a zoo knows the same about is cage as humans about our purpose in earth. The image of a deformed human body torned apart by every kind of pain obviously haunts me, but not as close as the empty eyes of someone who has realized his lonelinness in this world. The eyes of someone who has realized there isn’t anything out there.
In the last painting of the exhibition, the last work of the artist, we see a bull fading into the afterlife. The image is the most beautiful in the whole gallery, we don’t see more pain, we don’t see more fear, just a farewell. And I ended with this strange feeling all over my soul, not knowing if that bull goes in peace because he goes to a better place after all, because there wasn’t anything to worry about or because it doesnt matter where he goes as long as is not in front of the matador.
Some words from the artist reconfort me at the end: "It seems that the only thing that last forever is the dust".
And as it is known, we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
written by:
Javier Montero Cubero
@javieeermontero
To assist to this exhibition was to assist to a funeral, to the espectacle of a descomposing body or a soul reaching nothingness.
As the title says, the main theme of the exhibition is supossed to be the correlation between human beings and the other animals that populate this planet. But, more than a mirror pointing directly to our primal instincts I found a quite raw approach to the act of dying.
One could say that death comes to us in many different ways. Through mental illness, sadness, the lost of beloved ones, despair, solitude and so on, so on. There’s more ways of meeting the reaper than with her last dance.
Bacon’s artwork expresses perfectly the pain of being, of exist. When life treats you bad it hurts, sometimes it even takes pieces of you and it sends them to oblivion. But when life treats you good, with love and care, it hurts too, because we know it wont last forever, because we don’t understand the meaning behind. And with this problem is where the so called beasts interfere. Being a perfect match between the aesthetic interests of Bacon and his need to explain this old as time feeling in a primary and direct way.
The repertory of paintings goes from body horror to existencial pain. For the body horrors the mix between animal features and human features it’s perfect to portray physical pain through a primary lens. The silenced pain of a deer in a hunting trap left to die it’s not so different from the pain of a man being crucified. The animal features help to erase the barriers of our human bodies to express all the pain we can feel inside.
Full of abstractions, the paintings show us dissappearing persons under a mask of fear, age or delusion, people being trap in a circle of pain similar to the stadiums where bull fights are celebrated. An animal in a zoo knows the same about is cage as humans about our purpose in earth. The image of a deformed human body torned apart by every kind of pain obviously haunts me, but not as close as the empty eyes of someone who has realized his lonelinness in this world. The eyes of someone who has realized there isn’t anything out there.
In the last painting of the exhibition, the last work of the artist, we see a bull fading into the afterlife. The image is the most beautiful in the whole gallery, we don’t see more pain, we don’t see more fear, just a farewell. And I ended with this strange feeling all over my soul, not knowing if that bull goes in peace because he goes to a better place after all, because there wasn’t anything to worry about or because it doesnt matter where he goes as long as is not in front of the matador.
Some words from the artist reconfort me at the end: "It seems that the only thing that last forever is the dust".
And as it is known, we are dust, and to dust we shall return.