Appetite and decay: the animal instincts in Bacon’s paintings

Colm Toibin | Royal Academy of Arts | 8th October 2021

Kafka wrote about a man who becomes an insect. Bacon was interested in similar territory, “the gap between the clothed human and the snarling figure hidden within the clothes”. Sometimes his man-creatures are on all fours, animality coupled with “a sort of suffering dignity … Their wildness includes a sense that they are in possession not merely of instinct but dark knowledge. Their quest is not only for food or blood but something unnameable and unobtainable.”