Francis Bacon & Mirror
The body enters the mirror and lodges itself inside it, itself and its shadow. Hence the fascination: nothing is behind the mirror, everything is inside it."
Gilles Deleuze
In this double portrait, George Dyer—for many years Bacon’s lover—sits in a revolving chair facing a mirror placed on a strange piece of furniture with a stand. The violent brutality of the image, with its distorted body and spasm-twisted face, is heightened by a ring of light from a source outside the painting. However, the face reflected in the mirror, though split in two by a strip of light space, is not racked by the same distortions. If the two halves of the reflection were joined together, they would provide a fairly lifelike portrait of Dyer, with his angular profile and hooked nose, and an expression combining a death wish and desire. Building on Picasso’s dislocated portraits of the mid-twentieth century, Bacon succeeds in capturing the most sordid side of human nature.
Bacon’s mirror painting inspired me in some way, instead of paint the whole mirror，why don’t i create a disorient space for the audience. Again , my obsession with reflective material push me unconsciously to put the background with kind tacky gold mirror sheet on. The signature here is to drew both both viewer and environment into the work, in some way the blurry audience shadow will also show in the painting, encouraging experience of phenomena as experienced from the first point of the view, evoking perception thought, bodily awareness.