Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
Gilles Deleuze, Daniel W. Smith
Language: English
Pages: 226
ISBN: B01A65495U
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential and revolutionary philosophers of the twentieth century. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is his long-awaited work on Bacon,widely regarded as one of the most radical painters of the twentieth century.The book presents a deep engagement with Bacon's work and the nature of art. Deleuze analyzes the distinctive innovations that came to mark Bacon's style: the isolation of the figure, the violation deformations of the flesh, the complex use of color, the method of chance, and the use of the triptych form. Along the way, Deleuze introduces a number of his own famous concepts, such as the 'body without organs' and the 'diagram,' and contrasts his own approach to painting with that of both the phenomenological and the art historical traditions.Deleuze links Bacon's work to Cezanne's notion of a 'logic' of sensation, which reaches its summit in color and the 'coloring sensation.' Investigating this logic, Deleuze explores Bacon's crucial relation to past painters such as Velasquez, CTzanne, and Soutine, as well as Bacon's rejection of expressionism and abstract painting.Long awaited in translation, Francis Bacon is destined to become a classic philosophical reflection on the nature of painting.
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rise? Because the fall must not be interpreted in a thermodynamic manner, as if it produced an entropy, a tendency to equalize at the lowest level. On the contrary, the fall exists to affirm the difference in level as such. All tension is experienced in a fall. Kant laid down the principle of intensity when he defined it as an instantaneously apprehended magnitude: he concluded that the plurality apprehended in this magnitude could only be represented by its approximation to negation = O.3
contemporary painters, Bacon does not make sketches).2 This preparatory work is invisible and silent, yet extremely intense, and the act of painting itself appears as an afterward, an aprescoup ("hysteresis") in relation to this work. What does this act of painting consist of? Bacon defines it in this way: make random marks (lines-traits); scrub, sweep, or wipe the canvas in order to clear out locales or zones (color-patches); throw the paint, from various 99 Francis Bacon angles and at
chaos. It retains a kind of oscillation from this leap. Such an abstraction is essentially seen. One is tempted to say of abstract painting what Peguy said of Kantian morality: it has pure hands, but it has no hands. This is because the abstract forms are part of a new and purely optical space that no longer even needs to be subordinate to manual or tactile elements. In fact, they are distinguished from simple geometrical forms by "tension": tension is what internalizes in the visual the manual
different as it may be from an external tactile mold, optical modeling in chiaroscuro still acts like a mold that has been internalized, in which the light penetrates the mass unequally. There is even an intimacy linked to the optical, which is precisely what colorists cannot tolerate in chiaroscuro, the idea of a "home" or even a "homely atmosphere," even if it could be extended to the whole world.19 So while the painting of light or value indeed broke with the figuration that resulted from a
Ambrogio Bondone, Legend of St Francis, Panel 19, Stigmatization of St. Francis, 1297-1300, Fresco, 270x230 cm. Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi, Italy. 10 [106] Greco, El (Domenico Theotocopoulos), The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz), 1586-8. Oil on canvas, 480 x 360cm. Iglesia de Santo Tome, Toledo, Spain. 9 [107] Michelangelo Buonarotti, The Holy Family with the Infant St. John the Baptist (Tondo Doni), 1504-6. Oil on canvas, 7 1 . 1 x 7 1 . 1 cm. Galleria