Bacon 'n' Rothko

"That maroon - I just find it depressing. If I want to be depressed, I just go to that room with all that maroon... It's awful." (Bacon-Bragg: on Rothko) There were a lot of people who wanted to be depressed, apparently. Reverent public amongst the giant canvasses. Quite serene, nervously excited, looking. Rothko gives little and asks a lot. A sort of maximum minimalism. A paired down problematic of our basic position, binary, the background and the form, a representation of the membrane. Rothko is trying to characterise the core dynamic of perception, stripping his vision down to the principle of apprehension. In doing so he stands before us naked, like Gormley. At some point, as many, I became uncomfortable with this self-exposure, but not because of a problem with confronting the naked vision. There is a limit of how much interest a genital full frontal can arouse, again and again. But even here, especially here in fact, he eludes assimilation with his canvas mirrors. While he gives nothing, he provides a canvas that reflects the gaze of the looker, a photo-negative of the mind. A sort of nadir of the looking-seeing spectrum, where the two are nearly one, in the subject. The paintings were all of naked people. Lost souls and marooned minds. Bragg: "What are you optimistic about?" Bacon: "I'm optimistic about nothing. But I'm optimistic."