Abstract

How does one talk about painting? This article analyzes how Francis Bacon’s painting announces the overcoming of the oppositions it contains, between painting and literature, abstract and figurative, sensation and language. By comparing this work with Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of it and Bacon’s own words, the aim is to show how this artistic practice has gone beyond the vocabulary available at the time to talk about it, which continues to play sensation off against language, the nervous system against the brain. It’s not a question of an essential divorce between theory and practice, but rather of a historically situated gap between an artistic practice and its contemporary discourses.