The environment (or decor), when there is any, seems to be there only to give a sense of the collapse. The architectural structure of the body and the lines of the face are shattered. What remains is a deformed and a deforming movement which leads to an aesthetics of the ruins: the fragmentation, the blurring and deforming of one’s face or body until only the flesh remains (or the meat, in Bacon’s case).

Bacon pursues a very particular project as a portrait painter: to dismantle the face, to rediscover the head or make it emerge from beneath the face’, Deleuze writes about Bacon. for the face is a structured, spatial organisation that conceals the head. . . . ‘Bacon is a painter of the heads, not the faces . . . They are the remains which allow a reflection of/over time-a shattering, devastating time which is disfiguring the bodily architecture. Ruins, like self portraits, give shape to the void, the emptiness, the damage.

This paper reads self portraits of Bacon, Freud and Auerbach not as a representation, but as the visual form of a collapse.

Thrill of the chase torrent