 |
Students' Webpage |
Francis Bacon Visits Madrid
by Ana Criado del Arco (2008-09, Intermedio 2)
Francis Bacon's exhibition in the Prado museum has caused mixed feelings in my soul. I cannot say that his way of using the colour palette, the dirty texture in the surface of the represented figures and the sensation of having been easily drawn, waving limits didn't touch me. All this made my skin almost freeze while walking through the galleries of the old, rehabilitated building. Also the contrast between the architecture of this new extension of the original museum and the aggressive paintings of Bacon pleased me.
However, I didn't like this kind of retrospective selection of Bacon's work at all. It transmits a so deep sadness and somehow sickness of spirit that after having visited the exhibition I went back home asking myself what should have happened to anyone like him to be the origin of such a disturbed and complex personality as I suppose he had.
The absence of context and the use of a very closed point of view which is very often centred in a deformed human being express in my opinion a violent loneliness that may produce rejection in the common public. So do also the opened black mouths, the silent crying of them I don't want to imagine in the darkness of the big wooden boxes where the paintings are over and over again translated from an international museum to another, without pause, without finding a definitive home where these mouths could finally be closed and breath a bit of peace.
(246 words)