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EXALTED “MEAT” (incomplete/ongoing project)

I used to despise Francis Bacon’s work, at a visceral level. But recent encounters with his paintings, especially his portraits, have changed me: his distortions have come to feel brutally true. Clearly, he is saying something that cannot be readily denied, escaped or avoided … his visual-artistic statements demand re-articulation and open-ended contemplation.

I made these portraits of Susannah to “think out loud” with images … to restate and examine what Bacon once said about flesh and identity. He claimed that “we are meat, we are potential carcasses.” … and it appeared that he fundamentally accepted this state of affairs … that he had resigned himself to the existential horrors that he so masterfully enacted in his paintings. He somehow yields to the anguish, fragmentation, and the terrors of embodiment. And he’s right … we are, of course, “meat”! But we can still resist this bottom line. I acknowledge that we are mortal and inescapably vulnerable, yet I reject the materialist resignation that follows from it. … I say: we must look for the seam where spirit presses through flesh. We must ask whether, beneath the bruised surfaces, something enduring, something sublime, still speaks.

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