Deeply Ordered Chaos:Francis Bacon at the Gagosian.

"The moment a number of figures become involved, you immediately come on to the storytelling aspect of the relationships between figures. And that immediately sets up a kind of narrative. I always hope to be able to make a great number of figures without a narrative" - Francis Bacon.

When Derek Jacobi played Francis Bacon in John Maybury's 1998 television film Love is the Devil, his powerful opening line was "like a bomb exploding in reverse. Thoughts, ideas, fragments of images, shards of memory, like shrapnel, all come back to me, and are forced back out in a cruel pastiche of experience".

There was an intensity about Bacon. His steely eyed countenance - but also his work. Tate Britain's 2018 group show All Too Human:Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life did a great job of showing how important he was to the development of 20c British figurative art (and placed him contextually not just with Freud but also with Auerbach, Kossoff, Kitaj, and countless others in that history). Francis Bacon:Couplings in the Gagosian's delightful Grosvenor Hill gallery works, at best, as an addendum to that show. 

Two Figures on a Couch (1967)

Two Studies from the Human Body (1974-1975)

That's not to say the art is bad. It's anything but. More that the pretext seemed to me a little flimsy. The basic gist is that Bacon's work, often, used space, distance, as well as intimacy to explore the relationship between two people (and, on one occasion, a monkey - why not?). Space both physical and psychological.

I'd like to have visited this show with my friend Neill from Bath. Neill's a pretty accomplished artist himself and, some years ago, he created a series of works called Manners Know Distance in which his subjects would stand either slightly too close, or slightly too far, from each other creating an unease. Suggesting as humans we're unsure, often, of where we stand in relation to each other.

The presence of other people affect how we behave. If a stranger walks in a room you may suddenly sit up straight and if you're trying to impress someone you may act with a little more grace than normal. But even somebody you feel totally relaxed and comfortable with will affect how you move, how you behave. Bacon's twisted, contorted figures already appear to be examples of humanity in extremis so it's tricky to gauge what effect the presence of another figure has had upon each of them.

Lying Figure (1959)

Bacon found the presence of others so 'inhibiting' he preferred not to have subjects sit for him and instead painted from memory, from photographs, and from Eadweard Muybridge's studies of people in motion. Although Bacon often refused to identify his subjects, some of the works in this series, he admitted, are of and about his former lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.

Bacon met Lacy, a fighter pilot - oh yes, in 1952 and for the next four years they had, as you can no doubt gather from some of the works, a passionate, fraught, and even violent relationship. When Lacy moved to Tangier in Morocco in 1956 things cooled down - a bit - but Bacon continued to visit him for the next lustrum and when Lacy died in 1962 Bacon continued to make work about him and their relationship.

Two Figures with a Monkey (1973)

Two Men Working in a Field (1971)

The year after Lacy's death, Bacon met George Dyer. Dyer was a petty criminal from the East End of London and soon he took Lacy's place, not just in Bacon's bed but in Bacon's art. It's unclear exactly which works in the show relate to Lacy and which to Dyer but there's a couple (it's all about couples here) on display that reveal an urgent, carnal intimacy bordering on transgression.

The Two Figures on a Couch have all but merged into one and, in the case of 1953's Two Figures, they certainly appear to be trying their damnedest to do so. Of course, an artist's personal life is not always relevant to their work but, like Picasso, Bacon made it so - and, as with Picasso, Bacon's lovers were painted with an almost abstract frankness that can veer from erotic to almost horrifying.

Painting (1950)

Figures in a Landscape (1954)

Seeing bodies as both erotically charged and disgusting at the same time or, more usefully, at different times appears to be are a very powerful human tool. We need to be attracted to each other to breed - clearly - but we also need to be disgusted by the thought of germs, diseases, and things coming out of the body that are best kept in.

Francis Bacon seemed to be constantly stuck between the point of exploding (like a bomb in reverse) this dichotomy ever wider open and resolving it. Which, of course, created a further dichotomy. The paintings at the Gagosian are, at first, difficult to (if you'll pardon the expression) penetrate. But stay with them for a while and, like the people they represent, they'll divulge their secrets to you.

Portrait of a Man Walking (c.1953)

Marching Figures (c.1952)

Two Figures in the Grass (1954)

Francis Bacon used to claim that he'd get a great sense of satisfaction by simply staring directly at paint on canvas and one minor gripe, the show was free after all, about the Gagosian's Couplings show is that the perspex screens in front of many of the works are so reflective that instead of seeing the paint and the twisted, often copulating, bodies Bacon intended us to see we simply see our own gormless faces looking back at us. Nobody wanks in front of a mirror (I hope)!

Two Figures (1953)

Sleeping Figure (1959)

That aside, and get that image out of your head immediately, this was a neat little collection of work by one of the great artists of the 20c. On its own it wouldn't have really done much to show you WHY Francis Bacon deserves that accolade but as you leave pondering what bizarre thought process brought him to make 1952's Marching Figures, what darkness was in his mind a year later when he created Portrait of a Man Walking, and how 1971's Two Men Working in a Field and 1973's Two Figures with a Monkey show the now older artist beginning to develop a more colourful palette you'll find it hard to deny that these works allure and repel in equal measure. 

Much like the shitting, farting, eating, drinking, sometimes failing us but often serving us, amorous, tender, and occasionally very beautiful frames we carry ourselves around in and we call our bodies. As Black Francis once yelped "break my body, hold my bones".  

Three Studies of Figures on Beds (1972)