Hernán Cédola
Algunos retratos y una naturaleza muerta
March 20 to April 25, 2019
Curatorial text
A few days ago I passed near the K20 museum and went back inside to see the two paintings by Francis Bacon that it has hanging spatially. This is the fifth time I am going to see them. The painting on the left belongs to the series of men in blue. The other is one of his paintings where a beast with human indications monopolizes the center of the shot in the middle of an undefined room that pretends to contain it, or expel it.
The thick and dirty brushstrokes are discovered in a belated look, it is necessary to stay for a long time and several times to go through the painting or in the best case it is the painting that penetrates us. That’s how I did it and that’s how I always do it, but with few, Bacon is one of them, Van Gogh among others, Macció closest. I cannot escape the mystery they generate, there is an intrigue to know.
I spent more than an hour and a half observing the painting, from close, further, middle distance. The security of the room (by protocol) looked at me several times accompanied by gestures such as asking me to keep my distance – “there are cameras and if they see that I am not asking them to distance themselves, they can call my attention” he said later as he approached as if taking my side – understanding that I was not someone who was to commit recklessness. And of course! How not to want to obsessively observe a painting and especially one by Bacon, how to understand its totality if we do not observe its minor intervals in detail. Develop what Benjamin held, a microscopic look.
Details inhabit what contains them.
The first meeting is summed up in a precarious look, one is only satisfied with what one imagines seeing. Then the non-form is blurred, a vestige of the human, closer to a bestial figure that we usually make up in civilized collages. In that filthy paint filling, full of fluff, dirt and grime perfectly suitable, the sordid image that hinders the careful aesthetics that we mortals prefer to hold is manifested. There is no escape from the atrocious truths that make us up.
This is where it is best understood what Morton Feldman tells us about the difference between the surface of a painter and a composer, where the composer of something imaginary composes something real, the note. On the other hand, the painter of something real, painting, composes something imaginary. An illusion.
Does this illusion of Bacon confront us with a part of ourselves that we do not know how to specify? An image, which is the illusion of seeing what we will never truly see, but usurps us.
Hernán Cédola
Düsseldorf annotations, April 14, 2015
