Thursday's Visual Treat - Day 4/ Big Bang Art Peep Show

Figure in Movement
photo courtesy of Tate Gallery, London

Peeps,

It's day four of the BIG BANG ART/PEEP SHOW and the featured artist is the late Irish painter, Francis Bacon. I admit that I am drawn to a strange, savage beauty of which Bacon excels; his solitary figures are distorted/contorted/anguished/agonized/featureless/armless/legless/objectified/subjectified/isolated/exposed/riveting/restless/doomed/damned.  And in viewing them, I feel caught somewhere between insanity and the sun.

Enjoy (or at least respect the beast (within all of us)).

Shane

Anne Marie D. Lee wrote on occasion of his exhibition at the Met entitled Francis Bacon: A Century Retrospective, {that} Most artists are deliberately abstruse when it comes to expressing their thoughts, filling the canvas with impenetrable abstractions or hidden symbolism. Not Francis Bacon. As an exiting observer remarked on her way out of this grimly exhilarating show, “He has something to say, and he’s saying it!”

Perhaps in more peaceful times, the impact of Bacon's blurred, pummeled faces and wide-mouth screams of man and beast could be received on a purely philosophical level, as acutely vivid allegories of existential angst. But in the context of today’s times, the juxtaposition of man and meat is all-too revolting, and the sight of nude biomorphic figures weirdly perched on pedestal or table all-too disturbing and real. It is art that speaks to, or more so howls at, the conditions of our own fear-ridden world, where violence and brutality have so savagely dehumanized the experience of life.