I have a long(ish) personal acquaintance with Baconís work. First introduced to his work at school by Mr Turpie, my art teacher, because of his painterly ways and his ways of organising space- still things that are relevant to my ways of producing work now- I have been looking at Bacon's work since I was 15, This is the first time I've had a chance to see a large number of pictures by him at once. I think this is a highly successful show. There must be some 50-70 odd pictures here, along with photographic materials from Bacon's studio- scraps, folded and torn and paint-besmeared. Working material, of course, rather than jewels from the dragon's hoard, but one can't help seeing a certain amount of theatricality and disingenuousness in Bacon's mounds of paint and scraps, the painter himself squatted amongst his misunderstood midden. As fascinating as theatre too, these thumb-folded, torn remnants that have seen action at Bacon's hand. As have his subjects. One feels Bacon's relationships to these sitters strongly. For all that there is a depersonalising undercurrent to Bacon's reducing the figure and the face to torrid chunks of swimming-in-and-out-of-focus meat, one nonetheless is under no illusions when Bacon knows the people he is portraying. It is as if the violence of Bacon's methods of depiction depend on his knowing them well enough to know the meaning of his transgression. And it's not all violence, by far. There are tender portraits here too, where the dissecting and refashioning gaze that gives us Bacon's howling popes can also pass across the face of a lover, sometimes elegaic, sometimes joyfully. Bacon is never triumphant. There are no pictures here that announce his mastery of the depiction. He is successful, even in his own words, at coming closer to his portraiture, but it remains an approach to grasping an evanescent impression.
There are images that don't depend on Baconís recognition of the figure, and indeed, he's always shoehorning in resemblances to other, impersonal, sources and studies. Bacon's series Man in Blue is here too, and whatever resemblances there may be to lovers lost and found, known or fleeting, there is above all the sense of a stranger in these pictures. Perhaps they are linked to people Bacon knew, but they are those people made strange, made once again into strangers. The Men in Blue lean against bars in the dark, their suits supporting heads that testify to Bacon's handling. They are marginal likenesses, smears that coalesce slowly and in the corner of the eye into faces one might know. This is a lonely nightclub, with this man's pale face alone in the darkness. The bar is a place intended for meetings and conviviality, a man alone because he has remained stock still like a man getting a shoeshine in an early photograph, visible only because he has stayed still. The man in blue is lost, and perhaps he is also a man whom Bacon has lost. Still there, at a bar somewhere, waiting for god knows what. The same might have been said of Bacon.
Another room includes a late self-portrait. A triptych of 1979 shines with mirror light. The theatre of Bacon's studio again, with the mottled disc of his great mirror swinging into view for us as we contemplate this work. Bacon's face, still, examined. His eyes do not meet ours. The face holds together, not energetically lensed and smeared like many other pictures, but held almost tenderly in the coolness of the painter's gaze. The blurb accompanying this picture says something about the emphasis on bone structure, on the skull. I don't see this. But a different memento mori does seem to be there. This face seems to house an intelligence that is trapped, that cannot comprehend the way the light reflects back from this casing, the sort of meat that Bacon has been fastidiously seeing through for years. He doesn't look at home.
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