Francis Bacon: The Real's Brutality. The Figure and the Other

Abstract

Getting in front of painting by Francis Bacon touches you deeply. Aesthetics, sensations: resounding flow that strikes abruptly, making futile any search for meaning. Francis Bacon circumvents the figurative, the meaning, he aims to the figural: to feelings, not words. Beauty, in his paintings, shows itself in the peaceful union of the positive and of its contrary; if the negative wasn’t there, though, his paintings wouldn’t exude such a brutal sense of reality. This essay investigates the figure of Francis Bacon and the spectator – the Other – as he tries to confront the painting. Bacon will be analysed using a purely phenomenological approach, with references that range from Merleau-Ponty to Martin Heidegger; the meeting-collision between the spectator and the painting, instead, will be examined taking inspiration from the Winnicott’s thesis on the relationship between Bacon and mirrors in the painter’s childhood. In order to take distance from Winnicott’s psychoanalytical approach, this essay will focus on the relationship between spectator and painting from a more anthropological point of view.