quinta-feira, agosto 30

Francis Bacon, Dublin / Irlanda do Norte - arte informal contemporânea

The Theater of the Body,
Mith and Tragedy, Head VI, 1949

Mith and Tragedy, Study after Velasquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953

Mith and Tragedy, Study of Velasquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent X

Mith and Tragedy, Study of Velasquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent X

Mith and Tragedy, Study after Innocent X, 1962

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait I

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait II

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait III

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait IV

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portait V

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait VI

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait VII

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portait VIII

Mith and Tradegy, Study for a Pope III

Mith and Tragedy, Study for a Pope III

Mith and Tragedy, Study for a Pope III

Mith and Tragedy, Study of red Pope


Francis Bacon was born in 1909, Dublin and died in 1992, Madrid.
British painter whose powerful, predominantly figural images express isolation, brutality, and terror.The son of a racehorse trainer, Bacon was educated mostly by private tutorsat home until his parents banished him at age 16, allegedly for pursuing his homosexual proclivities. Self-taught as an artist, he drifted in Berlin and Paris before settling in London in 1928, after which he worked as an interior decorator. He had also begun painting, though he did so without recognition until 1945, at which time the original and powerful style displayed in such works as “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (1944) won him almost instant notoriety. His mature style emerged completely with the series of works known as “The Screaming Popes” (1949–mid-1950s), in which he converted Diego Velázquez's famous “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” into a nightmarish icon of hysterical terror.Many of Bacon's early paintings are based on images by other artists, which he distorts for his own expressive purposes. Examples of such themes are the screaming nanny from Sergey Eisenstein's film Potemkin and studies of the human figure in motion by the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Most of Bacon's paintings depict isolated figures, often framed by geometric constructions, and rendered in smeared, violent colours. He was admired for his skill in using oils, whose fluidity and mysteries he exploits to express images of anger, horror, and degradation. His later portraits and figure paintings are executed in lighter colours and treat the human face and body in a style of extreme distortion and contortion.Bacon's devotion to his art stood in curious contrast to his subject matter and the eccentric squalor of his personal life. Because he destroyed many of his early works, only a few examples can be found, mainly in American and European museums.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Crítica:
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Francis Bacon, arguably the preeminent British painter of the twentieth century, was also for forty years the most controversial. Bacon's art often appears deliberately disturbing. His subject was the human form. Bacon reinterpreted the physical construction of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. To him it was something to be taken apart by the artist's penetrating gaze and then put back together again on canvas. He forces us to see, perhaps for the first time, the separate shapes and stresses hidden in the familiar human figure.
Bacon's treatment of the face could be especially challenging. In his portraits, generally of people the artist knew well, the subjects are sometimes shown screaming. Even in repose the features shift and reshape themselves before our eyes, yet they never become unrecognizable despite the swirling paint.
Often called an Expressionist or even a Surrealist, Bacon himself strongly rejected both labels. He insisted that in its own way his work was close to the world we see every day, remaining true to what he called "the brutality of fact."
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The Theater of the Body
Perhaps the term that best describes Bacon's work is "realism," a classification that is often employed too loosely but which here is meant in a special sense. In this case, realism does not mean direct, straightforward representation—something Bacon dismissed as mere "illustration," and from which he felt as far removed as from abstract painting. Instead it means a fidelity to the vital experience of living inside the body, which for him is a fundamental theme of art. Like the realists of the nineteenth cen-tury, Bacon scrupulously recorded the mobile, shifting reality of the human form with the means that painting placed at his disposal. The difference is that by Bacon's time, a century later, the arsenal of resources for painting is much greater; naturalistic, imitative criteria are no longer sufficient. Bacon's realism is, therefore, radically modern, and his point of departure, as he freely admitted, was Pablo Picasso's work from the late l920s, which is sometimes considered Surrealist, though of an unusually tough-minded kind.
The drama in Bacon's painting arises from the fact that, inevitably, the viewer cannot help but identify to some extent with what a picture shows. The distortion of the body's ordinary appearance in a painting can make us cringe with a new and discomforting sense of how human flesh and bone are constituted. With Bacon, the figure often appears at the edge of dissolution, just prior to becoming unrecognizable. The painter concentrates all the violence of the brushstroke in the human form, using the agitated pictorial material to embody the convulsions of the flesh. To achieve this effect, Bacon at times hurls handfuls of paint against the canvas, forming it subsequently with his hands, the paintbrush, or other direct means. In these ways he affirms his presence in all its "brutality of fact."
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Myth and Tragedy:
In the evolution of Francis Bacon's art, especially in its initial stages, several motifs are repeated frequently. Some of them come from specific paintings of the past, such as the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, the Eisenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grtinewald, or the Crucifixion by Cimabue. Others come from myths recounted in literature, as with the themes taken from the Greek tragic poet Aeschylus or from T. S. Eliot. When Bacon uses such materials, it is not a question of retelling their stories or giving a literal re-creation of earlier pictures, but rather of stripping those original structures down to their essential human content. If Bacon used themes from those sources to surround his work with an aura of tragedy, he did so in order to suggest what evoked the primal scream shown in his early canvases—the intimate violence of real things. These recurrent motifs therefore function as meeting points between one's individual life experience and a larger sense of myth—that ancestral repository which has managed to preserve forms of representation appropriate to complex, difficult subjects throughout the ages. The Crucifixions, the bullfighting scenes, and the references to tragic literature selected by Bacon thus have in common an urge to deal with conflicting feelings and unknown forces—an urge, indeed, toward catharsis. Beyond the individual interest of each work, these canvases provide the key to the type of relationship Bacon sought to establish between viewers and his paintings, something similar to the attitude we might assume before a ritual whose meaning is unknown to us.
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Head VI
The first trace in Bacon's work of the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez. The primal scream is the outstanding motif of these first canvases, where nearly the entire face disappears in shadow, leaving only the mouth that utters the cry. The background is a sort of curtain of shadows from which the figure emerges.
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Study after Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
The veil placed between the viewer and the figure of the Pope crying out derives from the textures of X-ray plates that Bacon often utilized in those years. The open mouth can be understood also as the result of a relaxing of the jaw that occurs in cadavers, which would well suit the spectral aspect of this figure.
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Study after Innocent X
A later version of the Velazquez theme where the cry no longer appears. The color has become lighter, and the spatial arrangement already characteristic of Bacon is present in all its elements: the transparent cage, the perspectival space that leaves the foreground empty, drawing the viewer in. Finally, the papal throne has been synthesized into simple volumes.
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Jose Maria Faerna,
Art of the 2oth century


domingo, agosto 19

Bill Viola, Nova Iorque / E.U.A. - arte conceptual contemporânea

III. Passage into night (2005),
video sound installation

II. Passage into Night (2005)

I. Passage into Night (2005)


Ocean without a shore (2007), video sound installation,
em exposição na Feira de Arte da Bienal de Veneza

IV. The Crossing (1996), video sound installation

III. The Crossing (1996)

II. The Crossing (1996)

I. The Crossing (1996)

Five Angels for the Millenium, I. Departing Angel (2001),
video sound installation

II. Birth Angel (2001)

III. Fire Angel (2001)

IV. Ascending Angel (2001)

V. Creation Angel (2001)

Going forth by Day, V. The First Light (2002), video sound installation

IV. The Voyage (2002)

III. The Deluge (2002)

II. The Path (2002)

I. Fire-birth (2002)

IV. The Messenger (1996), video sound installation

III. The Messenger (1996)

II. The Messenger (1996)

I. The Messenger (1996)

The Shape of Life in the Space after Death,
Isolde's Ascension (2005), video sound installation

The Shape of Life in the Space after Death,
Tristan's Ascension (2005)

Night Journey (2005), video sound installation

Night Journey (2005)

Emergence (2002), video sound installation




Becoming Light (2005), video sound installation

The Fall into Paradise (2005), video sound installation




The Surrender (2001), video sound installation

II Vapore (1975), video sound installation,
(em exposição no Museu Berardo, Lisboa)

Study for the Raft, Tempest (2005), video sound installation
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Bill Viola (b.1951) is considered a pioneer in the medium of video art and is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has beeninstrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art,and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology,content, and historical reach. For over 35 years he has created videotapes,architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic musicperformances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’svideo installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image andsound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by theirprecision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleriesworldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channelvideotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while hiswritings have been extensively published, and translated for internationalreaders. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as anavenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern andWestern art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, IslamicSufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughtsand collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowingviewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.
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Of the work Bill Viola states: Ocean Without a Shore is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in San Gallo become transparent surfaces for the manifestation of images of the dead attempting to re-enter our world.” “The video sequence describes the human form as it gradually coalesces from within a dark field and slowly comes into view, moving from obscurity into the light. As the figure approaches, it becomes more solid and tangible until it breaks through an invisible threshold and passes into the physical world. The crossing of the threshold is an intense moment of infinite feeling and acute physical awareness. Poised at that juncture, for a brief instant all beings can touch their true nature, equal parts material and essence. However, once incarnate, these beings must eventually turn away from mortal existence and return to the emptiness from where they came.”
Bill Viola website
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Crítica:
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Night Journey, a second projection piece, explores the relationship between the complementary elements of light and darkness, male and female, action and contemplation, with fire as the unifying force. The work is divided into two parts. First a man is seen approaching through the darkness, drawn by the light of a fire through which he must pass to reach the source of his desire. In the second part, a woman lights a bank of candles one by one, gradually filling the room with light and transforming her form into a silhouette. After a moment of reflection, she turns away from the light and walks into the darkness.
Becoming Light is a flat-screen piece that describes an erotic journey towards ecstasy and union in the form of a drowning. The lover's bodies float slowly together just below the surface of a dark pool, intertwined in a sensual embrace that is only interrupted by their gasps for air. Eventually they begin a long descent into the dark depths where their illuminated forms become joined together as a single point of light.
Emergence began with a passing idea for a piece called 'Woman Supporting Slumping Man'. Later, leafing through a book on the early Renaissance Italian artists Masaccio and Masolino, he came upon a color plate of Masolino's fresco showing the corpse of the dead Christ in his tomb, supported by his mother Mary and John the Evangelist.
Messenger video installation (originally done in 1996) was in St Paul's Cathedral feb 2004. A figure comes up from the depths of water to the surface. when he breaks the surface the sound and view is astonishing before he descends back to the depths. (Messenger 4) this is the moment where the messenger breaks the surface of the water.
The Crossing (1996) is one of the most powerful works on view. Two large screens mounted back to back simultaneously represent the violent annihilation of a man by opposing forces of nature: fire and water. On one screen, flames lick up from his feet until they appear to consume his entire body. On the other, water falls in a deluge from above until the form is obliterated. In the end, the man disappears entirely and only the flickering flames and lingering drops remain on each scarred floor where the figure stood. The cycle then begins anew, highlighting the purifying, transformative capacity of the elements. The Crossing recalls a line from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi-whose works have greatly inspired Viola-who wrote: "You have seen the kettle of thought boiling over, now consider the fire."
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
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Les vidéos de Bill Viola ont en général cette capacité magique à vous laisser sans voix, le souffle coupé, les yeux écarquillés, avec un sentiment d’hébétude et d’émerveillement au tréfonds de vos tripes. Comme toujours, chez Viola, la dimension religieuse, mystique n’est pas loin, sans référence à une quelconque église.

Fall into Paradise commence avec une minuscule lumière au fond d’une immensité aquatique. Peu à peu, cette lumière grandit et devient un couple enlacé se rapprochant de nous, et qui soudain crève la surface de l’eau violemment, puis flotte paisiblement. Becoming light est un ballet érotique sous-marin qui finit en noyade. Lovers’ Path montre les deux amants aux corps indistincts émerger de la forêt sombre, accéder petit à petit à la lumière, à la matérialité, et s’enfoncer main dans la main dans la mer, vers la noyade.

Passage into Night, une femme vêtue de longues robes et coiffée d’un voile, marche sur une terre surchauffée; dans un mirage, ses formes ondulent dans l’air déformé par la chaleur. Pendant 50 minutes, elle se rapproche, devient petit à petit reconnaissable, puis son corps occupe tout l’écran, sa robe noire obscurcit tout, on ne voit plus rien.

L’Ascension de Tristan et celle d’Yseult, la première est l’ascension d’un corps mort, étendu sur une pierre tombale et qu’une cascade d’eau ascendante projette vers le ciel: l’anti-gravité fait jaillir l’eau de plus en plus fort, le corps peu à peu se soulève, s’arrache à la pierre, se cambre et s’envole : ascension-résurrection. Le corps d’Yseult, lui, évolue sous l’eau, laissant derrière lui une traînée de bulles d’air, disparaissant dans les abysses.Des vidéos mystérieuses, envoûtantes, sur la vie et la mort, sur la passion et l’esprit. Pas de narration autre que celle de Wagner, c’est un travail presque abstrait sur la perte de l’autre. On y reste des heures, croyez-moi.
Blogue Amateur d'Arts, Le Monde