From: Alex Alien | Sensationist Portraits

Francis Bacon's portraits drip drool, leak lamella, shoot spunk sensationing slippery surfaces, stubborn stains smouldering selves. The faces, heads, of Bacon's become the register, externalisation, of the body's jewel juices which drip drool from the jaw, the nose, the mouth, the eyes leaking lamella, swamp sewer, subconscious sea, shot spunk, slithering spume with all the froth and the foam locked leaking about, around the face, the head. Bacon never paints a whole head, a full-face rather an opening, an open would as flawed face un-unified: the features froth, foam: fuel form leak lamella bleed bone skin surface: there is no ego only ooze oily eggo. For Bacon, the 'beauty of the paint' throws out the eggo of 'the ugly object' alienualising the abject sublime, the beautifully ugly. Grit, grain, gore, dirt, spunk, saliva stain, scar, flaw the skin surface, the face form, the hole head hollowing out, opening out becoming boiled bled bare oozing oils weaving wonderful wet wounds. Bacon inverts time and Rembrandt by painting himself getting younger and younger the older and older he gets: Bacon served himself severed off the bone al la botox. Bacon unfaces the mask revealing the mask behind the face in front of the head. Bacon did not paint his own passing, his decay, his map of time which was his face. In Three Studies for Self Portrait 1979 the left panel is painted with a Mother of Pearl opal aura becoming an ancient alien botox-baby face. Bacon's Study for self Portrait - Triptych, 1985-86 was a streamlined sensation of mis-recognition where surfaces are smoothed out, lines lost, where Bacon becomes a kind of botox alien baby again.

Looking at himself in a shocking pink plastic hand mirror, Bacon said to Michael Peppiatt later in life: "Do I really look that young? Well, there it is. There's nothing you can do about those things. You're always as old as you are, even if every now and then someone comes along who thinks you're much younger, then of course who's very shocked when you tell them your age. That's just what's called the horror of growing old and having everybody else dying round you like flies. I've got nobody left to paint now except myself. There it is. Even if it's just this old pudding face of mine." (Peppiatt, Francis Bacon Anatomy of an Enigma, Westview Press, 1996.)

Bacon stated to David Sylvester: "I like painting good-looking people because I like good bone structure. I loathe my own face, I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do. It's true to say...One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.' This is what one does oneself." But this is not what Bacon did in his self- portraits: what Bacon saw, imaged, painted was plastic surgery at work. Bacon pondered with the idea of having a face-lift for himself: "...if there was any way of regaining youth, even if it meant an unpleasant operation, I'd be the first to do it..." Michael Peppiatt added: "Having scrutinized the results of face-lifts on several close women friends, he regularly toyed - but only toyed - with the idea of having one done himself." (Peppiatt, Francis Bacon Anatomy of an Enigma, Westview Press, 1996.) Bacon's faces, heads, stumps are strikingly similar to Jawlensky's faces, heads, meditations with their alien aura, elliptical eyes, dark discs, flawed features, primordial power. Bacon said to Sylvester: "I mean, appearance is like a continuously floating thing." So Bacon's 'late' self-portraits have the silent sensation of Jawlensky's 'late' floating fleeting melting meditations: being-towards-nothing.

"He [Bacon] said he thought that painting portraits was the most interesting thing he could ever hope to do: 'If only I could do them...To get the essence without being positive about the actual shapes - that's the difficulty It's so difficult it's almost impossible!'.......the face was hardly recognisable as a face for it was disintegrating before your eyes, suffering from a severe case of elephantiasis: a swollen mass of raw meat and fatty tissues. The nose spread in many directions like a polyp but sagged finally over one cheek The mouth looked like a painful boil about to burst..."

Bacon's portrait of Beaton, Self-Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton.

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