Francis Bacon “Portrait of Lucian Freud” 1965

“The entire series of spasms in Bacon is of this type: scenes of love, of vomitin and excreting, in which the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs to rejoin the field of the material structure…and the scream, Bacon’s scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth”

What Deleuze is talking about, I think, is the finding of the figure rather than the figurative. Its about finding the essence of his protagonists physicality, not its appearance. Its an excavation of the aesthetic which evokes rather than describes. The physical sensation visualised not the from mirrored. I suppose there is a link here to the more psychological peeling back of the skin performed by Bacon’s contemporary, Lucian Freud.

Deleuze goes on to say: “The heads are all prepared to receive these deformations (hence the wiped, scrubbed, or rubbed out zones in the portraits of heads)”

Its as if Bacon’s consciously abstract and shifts his visual in order to refind a pure form. Its that constant search for the reinvention of realism.