The launch of Jock McFadyen’s Tourist without a Guidebook exhibition at the Royal Academy coincides with Francis Bacon’s Man and Beast show, writes Ed Gray.
The RA has put together a great pairing of two painters who understand surface tension and the possibilities of paint. Bacon grapples with internal post-war fury and savagery in overwhelmingly oppressive large-scale works; McFadyen is a tour guide to external post-capitalist detritus working on a similarly large-scale. Lucien Freud described Bacon’s technique as ‘calculated recklessness’ and the phrase serves McFadyen equally well.
There is such volume in Bacon’s work, figuratively and metaphorically. You hear the muffled weight of strangled screams and monstrous moans emitted by these twisting, writhing sinuous figures. Bodies move in slow motion contorted by paint that skims and spatters the surface. In these works Bacon elevates the tragedy of struggling brief lives lived within the human jungle to crucification status.
Bacon’s aim was to paint skin like it was rhino hide. In his final painting, Study of a Bull, fittingly a bull exiting the ring, he created the fuzz of bull fur with his own dust. It’s hard to turn away from this triumphant metamorphosis of man and beast because here is the end of the struggle, the certainty of mortality finally realised while the painting remains alive yet, quickening your heart and branding itself into your retina forever.
McFadyen loiters with wry intent in unloved alleys and street corners and opens them up to our eyes so you look up at big skies and feel your way along damp crumbling brush mark brickwork. There’s humour here and joy at discovering a sense of place. Here are the unknowable stories written all over our urban spaces if only we can stop and stare long enough; industrial echoes, graffiti tags, human expectation, ingenuity and failure and all the rendezvous for illicit purposes or drunken kisses or shelter from the elements. Jock brings all this to us, collecting forgotten places and guiding us through them with a rueful nod and a wink, human spaces, the mess of life.
Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BD
Francis Bacon on until April 17th. (£22 – £24.50)
Jock McFadden RA until April 10th (Free)
Booking: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk