Raw, unmediated Bacon

"There is an area of the nervous system", Bacon believed, "to which the texture of [oil] paint communicates more violently than anything else." Paintings (some paintings anyway) could mysteriously "unlock the valves of sensation" or of "intuition and perception about the human situation"; could, by seemingly subliminal means, evoke a memory trace of raw, unmediated existence. Somewhere behind this lay Baudelaire and Proust, with their different ideas of involuntary memory. But for Bacon (who also liked to cite Paul Valéry: "modern man wants the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance"), to unlock the valves of his own subconscious was to bring up onto the canvas and "onto the [viewer's] nervous system" an apprehension of life or "being-aliveness" as violent, primordial struggle, redeemed only by an instinctive grace, or a stroke of luck.

From Alan Jenkins' review of the Bacon show at Tate Britain. Thinking against the impulse to assume from this that content or subject matter is a guarantor of such apprehension (what we might call The Illusion at 3AM), I'm reminded of Beckett's quarter essay on Joyce: "His writing is not about something; it is that something itself."