Man Kneeling in Grass 1952

Francis Bacon made this oil painting, Man Kneeling in Grass, sometime during his career, though the exact date remains unconfirmed. Bacon’s canvases are theatres of the body. Here, the figure dissolves into the ground, a fleshy monumentality fighting against erasure. What I love about Bacon is the way he pushes figuration to its limit. The raw materiality of the paint itself becomes a protagonist. Look at how the dark hues around the perimeter seep into the scene, blurring the boundaries between figure and ground. Then there’s the grass, rendered with these insistent, almost violent strokes, as if Bacon is trying to trap the figure within the landscape. It reminds me of Paula Rego, the way she could conjure up these really unsettling psychological dramas through her depictions of figures in confined spaces. With Bacon and Rego, it’s all about the tension, the push and pull between what’s seen and what’s felt, what’s real and what’s imagined.