BACON ARTAUD VINCI. A magnificent wound.

Front and back covers of the book.

Florence de Mèredieu
BACON ARTAUD VINCI
A magnificent wound
Published by Blusson Editions (november 2019)

How did Francis Bacon and Antonin Artaud envision the development, representation and destruction of the human figure ? Paintings, drawings : the affinities that their works have with the body, the flesh and the meat, their privileged relationship to the formless is anchored in a representative system inherited from the Renaissance. And Leonardo da Vinci.

The themes of academicism, the lesson of anatomy, pictorial and graphic fluidity are allied to the pain and the "nails" of the Crucifixion. The electrical system of tensions and contradictions, which secretly tag the Great Work of the Vinci, is manifested crudely and raw in the paintings of Francis Bacon and graffiti Artaud le Mômo. A TRANSVERSAL Art History, articulated around three works - artistic and human - fundamental.

BIRTH OF A BOOK (Excerpt)

"Working on the canvas of Francis Bacon, Artaud's drawings and - more precisely - the drawings of his 406 small school notebooks [Preserved at the National Library of France.], Browsing the Vinci texts and the whole of his anatomical drawings - and as I recall the manner of condemnation (violent and almost obsessive) of the pictorial procedures of the latter by Antonin Artaud - I was struck by the similarity of certain issues. Namely an obsession with the human figure (or non-figure or figure-limit), a constant reference to academicism (which turns into a violent anti-academic process in the case of the Mômo, as in the case of Francis Bacon ).

This passion of the Vinci for a system of representation of appearances which passes by the recourse to a mathematics and a set of precise formal grids, Artaud (whatever one can think about it) never completely abandoned it and Bacon will have there systematically enough to sit on its limbs and organic shreds. » (Florence de Mèredieu)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Nail the representation / Nail the informs
Birth of a book
Academism and Anti-Academism
Opening : The bird and the operating table
Codex. Notebooks. Documents.
Leonardo's Notebooks
Documents. Fragments. Papers. Waste.
Academism and distortion
A carnival of "Open Mouths"
The Vitruvian Man : from Vinci to distortions and disproportions
(Antonin Artaud and Francis Bacon)
Circle and square
The confusion of scales
Crucifixions
Bone and Flesh : Anatomy Lessons
The Dead. The Living. The remains and the skin
The nails of the crucifixion
Nail. Stud
The similarity informs
Grid. The cage. The workshop.
Color and pictorial fluidity.
From Leonardo's "sfumato" to the "water blue of Van Gogh's canvases"
Balloons. Strands. Flying machines and swings.
Nerves. Sensitivity. Electricity. Short-circuit.
Deformations. Incompletions. Mirrors. Secrets.
Chronicles. Biographical fragments.

Bibliography.

Link to Blusson Editions

Drawing of Antonin Artaud