The Mystery of Appearance
The Hunch of Venison‘s current exhibition in their London galleries is named after a phrase from a quote by Francis Bacon:
To me, the mystery of painting today is how can appearance be made.
I know it can be illustrated, I know it can be photographed.
But how can this thing be made so that you can catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the making? …
One knows that by some accidental brush marks suddenly appearance comes in with a vividness that no accepted way of doing would have brought about.
The exhibition is dedicated to him and a hand full of his “post-war British” contemporaries, who together formed the “School of London”. What makes these painters so significant is their opposition to the minimalism and abstraction that dominated their contemporary discourse. By daring to bring figuration back into painting they brought about an alternative to the dichotomy of abstract expressionism and pop art.
One of the pieces in the show is Bacon’s Pope I — Study after Pope Innocent X by Velázquez (1951). By dedicating his paintings to an old master Bacon emphasizes a new chapter in the art discourse that he relates to: Velázquez was a master of representation and of documentation, Bacon on the other hand opened a third possibility for the development of painting beyond pure representation or pure abstraction.
Gille Deleuze refers to Bacon’s pope studies in his analysis on the Logic of Sensation in which he also establishes an aesthetic theory around this third path in painting that refuses both the figurative as well as the path of pure abstraction. Working with David Sylvester’s interviews of Francis Bacon, Deleuze puts forward a theory of figure versus figuration to decipher the sensational affects conjured by Bacon’s paintings. Figuration according to Deleuze is the illustrative and the figurative, it is addressed to the head and acts through the brain. The Figure on the other hand is the sensation that acts immediately upon the nervous system — goes right to “the flesh”. The problem becomes one of balance between illustration and Figure, between figuration and sensation — Bacon figures a screaming pope. The mystery of appearance: a seated figure to which nothing visible happens becomes a sensation of violence.
