Reflection on

Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation

-Shrankhla Narya
The task of art is to capture forces. Deleuze says that force is what ultimately makes art abstract. In
painting this means "rendering visible forces that are not themselves visible". Deleuze does this
through the investigation of the deformations in Bacon's paintings, which are the result of the forces
exerted on the immobile Figure. This force lends itself neither to a transformation of form, nor to a
decomposition of elements, it reorganizes the body's posture. Deformation is always bodily, static,
subordinating movement to forces which give another meaning/understanding to the structure of
Bacon's paintings. As an example - as the scream in Bacon's paintings is produced by an invisible
force that lies even beyond pain or feeling (and not by an external spectacle/horror), a relation is
established between the visibility of the scream and the invisible force. Bacon also renders visibility
to forces through his usage of color - each color indicates a force exercised on the corresponding
zone of body, thus immediately making it visible. The aim is to paint the violence of sensation, not
representation, to paint the scream more than the horror. He paints people in postures of
ordinary discomfort and constraint. It is not a taste for horror, but pity that captivates Bacon.
Deleuze relates Bacon back to the Egyptians, with his use of the single plane of a close, haptic vision,
the contour connecting the form and the ground. But it moves on from there, introducing a
catastrophe into this Egyptian image. The form is no longer essence but an accident, maybe as a
metaphor to humankind. The haptic unity is broken.
Classical conception of painting was that of a framed widow. But what Deleuze calls the 'logic of
sensation' works with uncoded 'diagramatic traits', which serve to create pictorial space in bodily
terms.
Deleuze declares that the painter does not paint on a virgin canvas, instead the canvas is already
covered over with pre-existing, pre-established clichs. Clichs, Deleuze writes elsewhere, are
anonymous and floating images which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate
each of us and constitute our internal world. The painter needs to empty the canvas of all these
"givens" that are present in it. Even reacting against clichs creates clichs. They work through
photographs via the narration of magazines and newspapers. But Bacon doesnt like aesthetic
photographs, photos for beauty: he wants photos of function, like x-rays or pictures from photo-
booths. He does not think photographs are figurative, they are something, and in this way they
compete with paintings, but photos can only maul the image (transform the clich). A photo always
remains figurative as a perceived thing. A photo has certitude, but a painting has equal and unequal
possibilities on the canvas. Deleuze also talks about free marks that free the painting from
figuration: this is the improbable itself. These marks are accidental but chance here is not probability
but a type of choice without probability. They are non-representative precisely because they rely
on the act of chance (manipulated chance). They are not concerned with the visual image, but the
hand of the painter. There is no chance except manipulated chance, no accident except a utilized
accident. Thus the painter must "get out of the canvas" (and so out of the cliche), he must
encounter all the figurative and probabilistic "givens" the canvas is full of, and battle against them.
The painter knows what he wants to do but he doesnt know how to get there: he cannot escape
representation or resemblance, but Bacon has a formula: create resemblance, but through
accidental and non-resembling means.
When making these accidental marks, a brush with a sponge or a rag opens a space, or as Bacon
calls it a graph or diagram. It is the emergence of another world. For these marks, these traits, are
irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, random. They are non-representative, non-illustrative, non-
narrative. They are no longer either significant or signifiers: they are asignifying traits.
What echoes in Deleuzes insistence is that understanding and thinking demand that we go beyond
the seeming order and sameness of things to the chaotic and active becoming which is the very
pulse of life. The diagram could be seen as a way of articulating the hidden virtual reality out of
which the actually experienced reality emerges. And so emerges another world - non-representative,
non-illustrative, non-narrative, with only the asignifying traits of sensation. The visual whole ceases
to be an optical organization. Within its chaos it carries the seed of the rhythm, the new order of the
painting. How a painter embraces this chaos and how he emerges from it defines the path he takes,
his tendency and its realization.
The abstract painting replaced the diagram with a code. With the abstract expressionism the
diagram expresses the entire painting at once, it is directed towards itself, taking the diagram for the
analogical flux itself. Bacon walks a middle way, avoiding both the code and its scrambling, not
allowing the catastrophe to take over and thus making the Figure emerge from it. Bacon's middle
way uses the diagram to constitute an analogical language. It is an analogy (resemblance) that is
produced by non-resembling means, through sensation, thus being neither figurative nor codified.
To my understanding Bacon uses the diagram as a virtual realm of pure difference, a problematic
field in which solutions do not overcome problems but simply actualize them under specific
conditions.
The diagram, through its chaotic catastrophe, liberates the 3 dimensions of painting (plane, color,
body). And then, avoiding the perpetuation of the catastrophe, by intertwining a sensation and a
frame, something else can emerge. The possibility of fact becomes the Fact, the diagram becomes
the painting. The diagram, if so, acts as a modulator. It is used to break all the figurative coordinates,
defining possibilities of fact. The geometry and colors, having been liberated, can then constitute the
Figure/Fact, the new resemblance. This way the diagram realized within a visual whole.

References
Rajchman John, "The Deleuze Connections", MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000.
May Todd, "Gille Deleuze, An Introduction", Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Smith Daniel W., "Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation",
Translator's Preface in Gilles Deleuze, "Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation", University of
Minnesota Press, 2005. Published on net athttp://www.upress.umn.edu/excerpts/Deleuze.html