Francis Bacon painted the shit we’re all too chickenshit to admit we feel at 3 AM when the numbness wears off. Those screaming popes aren’t about religion or some art history circle jerk (and yes, I’m aware I’m about to do some art history about Bacon, but it’s a different kind of art history, the kind that admits the paintings are about what we feel rather than what they reference), they’re about power eating itself alive, about the cage we’re all trapped in whether we’re wearing purple vestments or a stained t-shirt.
He took Velázquez’s smug Renaissance prince and ripped his face off to show us what’s underneath all that authority: pure, howling terror. The mouth open like a wound. And Francis Bacon did it fifty times because once wasn’t enough, because the scream doesn’t stop just because you captured it.
The repetition isn’t obsession, it’s honesty.
The horror doesn’t take a break.
He painted meat because we ARE meat, beautiful rotting gorgeous meat, and all our pretensions about the soul and dignity are just curtains we hang to pretend we’re not livestock. Those transparent cages in Francis Bacon’s paintings? That’s the social contract. That’s civilization.
I can see right through the bars but I’m still stuck inside.
Bacon was a sadomasochist, a drunk, a magnificent disaster who somehow channeled all that damage into something that makes me feel less alone in my own damage. His figures writhe and dissolve because that’s what it feels like to be human when the lies get stripped away. No redemption, no hope, no bullshit, just the raw fact of existence screaming back at me from a purple void.