Many years ago I came across a phrase that to this day, no matter what it means to its author, reflects my personal perception of art. I admire what fantastic or gloomy paintings convey, even if, as they said about the paintings of the author of the quote E. Delacroix, due to the conveyance of vivid despair and cruelty – “there is a massacre of art». Maybe this is, of course, a quote from Statham or Jacques Fresco and the Internet is deceiving me, but it still sounds very good.
Many artists talk about escaping reality. They believe that modern man needs new sensations. And now I would like to draw your attention to a British artist who creates a certain “reality deformation». Various kinds of sensations may arise when viewing his paintings, but he always had one personal goal – to evoke “visual shock». What his work does well to this day. Meet this Francis Bacon.
Man or monster?
Bacon considers the triptych to be his most serious work Three studies for figures at the foot of a crucifix 1944. So that you understand how “serious” the work was, I will say that he destroyed almost all the paintings that were painted BEFORE.
And there are many different theories about https://golden-panda-casino.co.uk/bonus/ what exactly is depicted in the paintings: both furies and biblical motifs. But more often these biomorphic creatures give rise to thoughts about the personal, about family. An interesting detail about the figure on the right is a piece of dry grass under his foot [or hoof?]. This dominant figure may reflect the artist’s father, who was a horse breeder. And on the left is the depressed image of the mother. The well-known Masahiro Ito, who works on the Silent Hill games, is very partial to these furies, as well as to all of Bacon’s work . He refers to the central figure of the second version of this painting, which was created much later, in 1988, the background of which had already changed from orange to maroon. It was this figure that inspired the illustrator to create the lips on Closer’s face in Silent Hill 3 . But the very “behavior of the head” of the monster is terribly associated with the portraits created by Bacon, if they suddenly came to life from their frozen position. More than once Masahiro Ito turned to the artist’s paintings when creating monsters, causing players that very visual shock!
Reality distortion.
It seems to me that the artist’s paintings are like a frozen frame, a photograph taken at a high shutter speed. The figures bend in agony, their body parts are mixed through a meat grinder, their faces are blurred. Director Adrian Lyne compares it to the effect of a sleeping pill. When the pill takes effect, you see a blurry picture and can hardly clearly determine the human nature of the creatures in front of you. He used this technique in his film Jacob’s Ladder.
But what is almost always recognizable in Bacon’s paintings is mouth. He screams or grins. Francis was impressed by the illustrations from a book about oral diseases that he once bought in Paris. He wanted to depict a beautiful mouth, with bright notes, but he believes that he was not able to do this in any of his paintings [“Francis, but your mouths are mostly black!?"].
In SH, amorphous creatures are created without eyes. Therefore, the mouth is an important emotional detail and hints either at swearing, or madness, or vulgarity.
Second version of the triptych ’44, Sad Daddy from SH: Origins and the flowing figure from the painting Three studies of figures at the Crucifixion.
Screaming is a process where the entire body comes out through the mouth.
In my blog about Salvador Dali, I wrote about the artist’s obsession with Millet’s painting Angelus, in which a child’s coffin was sketched with a basket of potatoes, as shown by X-ray analysis. He turned to this picture dozens of times, it haunted him. And in the case of Bacon it was a painting by Diego Velazquez Portrait of Pope Innocent X. What did he do with the poor “dad”, writing about 40 different variations of him. But most importantly, he really wanted to make this image scream! The very sample of the cry came to Bacon from a silent historical film by Sergei Eisenstein Battleship Potemkin. Namely, from the screaming mouth of a nurse.
Painting Figure with meat 1946, which still features Pope Innocent X, was inspired by game designers Blasphemous . The art book for the game explains the influence on the hero named Jocinero, who was first in the bull: "This very powerful image inspired the design of the figure of the bull, grotesquely divided in two, as if it were the open wings of an angel, symbolizing the birth of the Son of the Moon, whose silhouettes reflect the tragic death of animals in bullfights.". Bacon himself thought these carcasses of meat were wonderful, talking about their stunning color and how beautiful they looked when hanging in butcher shops. Another figure with meat appeared in the game DUSK, but just as a reference.
