The absence of noise is different from silence.  It is a state of being where sound should be present but isn’t.  This is a predicament which painting can be the most effective of mediums at articulating, it was present for a short time in the formative years of cinema, when film was silent, but even then its effect was diluted through the moving image, it very rarely stayed long enough to haunt you.  Perhaps the exception is in Eisentsteins film The Battleship Potemkin (bare in mind i may have spelt this completely wrong) which so famously influenced Francis Bacons scream.  The potency is captured in images at times when our logic tells us there should be noise but there isn’t, the effect produced by the knowledge of something missing.

It is curious that at a stage in human development when we are offered everything at the flick of a switch, the greatest potential strength in painting is in its perceived weakness to not be able to offer us all we expect of a modern appliance. 

The first great exponent of the silent scream came before it was evident that anything was even missing.  So it is in this respect, no surprise at all, that Goya found his absence in the wake of the illness that left him profoundly deaf.  He was a very great painter already, but after the illness his work seemed to reach a new level of clarity and painful precision.  For a man whose sole purpose was that of communication, both to give and receive, the pain of this disability must have been keenly felt.

There is an architect working today, I can’t remember her name, who speaks of the importance in experienciality.  What she means by this is that throughout the history of humankind we have sought to control our immediate environment.  And now, we have finally come to a point in our evolution where we have reached a level of almost complete control.  We have central heating at home, so the temperature remains at a constant, we get into our cars and the same applies, get to work and the same again.  This need for control spreads further still, into our social world.  We are connected to people in ever more disparate ways.  We communicate via text or email, we make friends over the internet with people we never meet face to face.  We have TV’s and hi fi’s in every room of the house.  All in an effort to curb and control our occaisions of human contact.  Why?  Because other people remain unpredictable and spontaneous.  The problem that all this controllig of the environment leads to a numbness, a numbness which we desire because its safe, but what we actually need is something different.  We in fact gauge the extent of our existence through experiences.  Perhaps more and more these experiences are needing to be manufactured in the form of adrenalin pursuits or (in the case of the architect) in the architecture of our homes.  So for eg. in order to go to the shower or kitchen you may travel down a walkway which takes you outside for a moment, thus experiencing different environmental conditions.

How does this affect the role of painting?  Well, the absence inherent in painting makes the present more profoundly and keenly felt.  But in order to make use of this, the previously stated factors have to be understood.  Just because its a painting doesn’t mean it automatically succeds in imagining the silent scream.

Its strange how i think of this when my most recent paintings hav been the quietest i have made, but then by describing them as quiet it shows that during their production I had, for the first time, begun to meditate on the importance of noise within a painting, indeed, i think they are my most successfully controlled works in terms of volume, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re my best,  or any good at all for that matter.

By understanding that the absence of noise isn’t exactly related to sound in the traditional sense, but in a more abstract musicality (ok, i know the analogy of music when describing painting is one of the oldest cliches but its relevant here) we can begin to understand the success of Goya’s greatest works.  The figures after the on set of deafness take on a more characterised appearence.  in the louder pieces, like his madhouse paintings, the faces are often gurning contortions.  It’s as if bone has taken on secondary importance to the maleability of the flesh.  And those key instruments of silent communication, the eyes, like full moons, and the hands, take on a profound significance in the acting out of each particular scenario.  the mouths themselves become caves, which appear to be sucking in the voice.

However even in his quieter paintings the impact is no less profound of disturbing.  Take a look at Bandit stripping a woman and tell me you’ve seen a more disturbing image.  The success of all his works lies in the pitch-perfect balance of the figure-ground relationship.  The ground as a nothingness is the perfect platform on which to cast his performances.  Amplifying their voices.

As for Fracis Bacon, well, just read all of the above.  The 2 greatest exponents of the silent scream lie as unerringly close bedfellows in the structure and composition of their works.