Dans les tableaux de Bacon, this is the bleu qui déjoue la pétrification. J'en perçois ainsi l'étrange vertu: le bleu est plus fort que le black; il troue les ténèbres et s'écoule jusqu'à nous.
Yannick Haenel, Bacon Blue, Stock, 2024.
In Bacon's paintings, it is the blue that outwits the petrification. Thus I recognize its strange virtue: the blue is stronger than the black; it penetrates the darkness and flows all the way to us.
Francis Bacon's art is a scream: his paintings, characterized by carnality, distorted faces, and shadowy existences, express humanity in a fragile yet violent form. Yannick Haenel's literary approach to Bacon's work in Bacon Blue It is an uncompromising immersion in the foundations of these images. The text itself becomes a kind of performative art, a linguistic reflection of Bacon's deformations, distortions, and existential urgency. Bacon's art forces the viewer to confront themselves—Haenel's language confronts this. His book thus becomes a literary equivalent of Bacon's work: radical, physical, unsettling, but ultimately possessing a profound, almost spiritual intensity.
Haenels Bacon Blue It begins with a cinematic setting, like the entire book series about writers' museum nights: The narrator spends a night alone in a Francis Bacon exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, and this spatial and temporal isolation is not merely a narrative device, but also an existential experiment. The opening establishes the museum as a kind of metaphysical space in which the narrator confronts not only Bacon's art, but also himself. The closed door separates him from everyday reality; entering the "sanctuary" is reminiscent of an initiatory journey or a journey into the subconscious. How does the body, the mind, the consciousness react to such an intense confrontation with Bacon's art? The answer is a mixture of physical crisis (migraine, dizziness, exhaustion) and metaphysical enlightenment. The viewer's eye is pierced by the violence of the images—an echo of Antonin Artaud's Le Théâtre de la Cruauté, which Bacon himself strongly influenced. Haenel immerses himself in the space of Bacon's images, loses himself in them, and becomes part of this grotesque, ecstatic theater of life and death.
For Haenel, Bacon's paintings are not mere artworks on a wall—they are a living presence that affects the narrator. The interplay of light reflections, the flickering neon colors, the blurred absence ("absence brouillée") of his perception reflect Bacon's distorted and traumatic visual worlds. This points to a fundamental idea in Haenel's work: art is not only an object of contemplation but an active force that transforms the viewer. The motif of uncertainty (for example, whether one is truly alone in the museum) corresponds to Bacon's recurring theme of existential loneliness. Here, literature becomes a mirror of Bacon's aesthetics—language itself becomes fragmented, subjective, and fraught with uncertainty.
Bacon's figures—often pope figures, headless bodies, isolated forms in transparent cages—appear like captive subjects of a higher power. Haenel takes up this iconography and transforms it into literary reflections on his own self. The deformation of the body in Bacon's images corresponds to the linguistic disintegration and recomposition that Haenel carries out. Here, a connection to Georges Bataille emerges, who placed the concept of "déchirure" at the center of his writings. Bacon's bodies are torn apart; their fleshiness is not a sign of vitality but of vulnerability—they hang between being and decay, pleasure and horror. Haenel embraces this state of suspension by weaving his own perception into the narrative fabric: the act of writing itself becomes an act of self-dissolution.
Haenel translates Bacon's physicality into linguistic images: his descriptions of the male bodies, the intertwining of flesh and geometry, are reminiscent of Bacon's obsessive depictions of distorted bodies, often in enigmatic architectural spaces. Haenel transfers Bacon's aesthetic into literature: the language becomes breathless, rhythmic, almost musical. The bodies in Bacon's paintings are never mere bodies—they are suffering, desire, movement, aggression. At the same time, this scene reflects Bacon's lifelong engagement with sexuality and violence. The narrator succumbs to this dynamic—there is no longer a detached observer, but only a complete immersion in Bacon's world.
A central motif in both Bacon and Haenel's work is the relationship between the sacred and violence. Bacon, who repeatedly employs the motifs of the scream, sacrifice, and tortured bodies, seems to draw on a religious visual tradition—but without transcendence. His popes do not scream from divine ecstasy, but from inner emptiness and existential desolation. The carnality of his figures is reminiscent of London's butcher shops. Haenel grapples with this tension by questioning his own literary position: Is writing a form of sacrifice? Is the writer a priest, an executioner, or a victim? Bacon Blue These roles become blurred, just as Bacon's painting makes no clear distinction between perpetrator and victim.
One scene refers to Bacon Œdipe and the Sphinx, d'après Ingres (1983). Bacon deconstructed Ingres' classic painting: Oedipus' body is bandaged, his eye obscured by a white line. The narrator encounters this scene not merely as a viewer, but as a participant—as if Bacon's work had drawn him into its logic—the motif of the loss of sight being central. Bacon's paintings force the viewer to see beyond classical aesthetics—they dismantle, fragment, and challenge. Haenel translates this moment into language: His narrator hesitates, becomes uncertain, and loses himself between image and text. The mythological allusion to Oedipus intensifies the existential question: How much truth can we bear? Bacon's distorted art shows the world as it is—full of pain, contradictions, and unanswered questions.
This is what I would like to recommend: this fois-ci, I don't let myself be laissez-faire, but I'll wait for the temps. The 1st hour of the matin, and part of the merveilleux robinet auquel j'étais collé depuis a demi-heure, je n'avais toujours rien vu des œuvres de Bacon.
L'œil me brûlait la nuque. The fallait en finir, je me suis returnne d'un seul coup et j'ai vu un sphinx. Il ne manquait plus que ça: par réflexe, sans doute à cause d'Œdipe, j'ai pensé que j'allais de nouveau être aveuglé.
The sphinx sits on a fond rose that opens onto the salle entière. Sa tête était tournée vers moi ; une pellicule opaque brouillait son visage. My heart is like a battle of great strength, it is as beautiful as the pierre. En m'avançant vers lui, j'ai vu qu'il était enveloppé d'un voile transparent. Come les tutors, it is available on the tête un base en nylon qui lui donnait un air ice.
Je tremblais: si a voile separate la vie de la mort, j'étais de quel côté? Est-ce que j'existais encore? After all, couched on my lit de camp, you can't wait to enter the morts: you don't have anything to do with it, you circle in a tombeau, with the spirits.
Le regard voilé du sphinx me fasait peur et m'attirait. Je me découvrais familier de son mystère, je captais son murmure: elle m'appelait. Je dis « elle » car c'était une sphinge, tout son être était féminin, et sur son torse pointait un sein dont la solitude s'adressait à moi.
It is available to a roomer who mounts other tables. Les colors are animated. A dune soul takes a tempête de sable, and the corps s'agitaient de all côtés, gris et nus, avec des torsions grimaçantes qui disloquaient leurs membres. Et puis, s'agglutinant dans mon champ de vision, comme si elles rappliquaient à l'odeur du sang, attirées par mon regard qui venait d'allumer ma presence à leurs yeux, des Érinyes avaient surgi sous la forme de rats avec des ailes, de chauves-souris dont la malfaisance ne fasait also doute.
En un clignement, ces visions se sont mélangées, composant une taie informe et grisâtre qui s'est jetée sur mes yeux ; Mais tout en avançant vers la sphinge, aidé par la lumière rose du tableau, j'ai esquivé la taie.
This is part of this instant meal with Bacon a commencé. Bien sur, j'étais ici depuis des Heures, et mes adventures avaient pris déjà a certaine épaisseur, mais en traversant ce premier obstacle pour me poster face à Œdipe and the sphinx, d'après Ingres (1983), je me suis mis à exister.
J'ai éclaté de rire en découvrant Œdipe: franchement, venir résoudre l'énigme en short et en maillot de corps, ce n'était pas très sérieux. Son pied, tendu vers la sphinge, était bandé et en sang. A tache de peinture blanche lui barrait l'oeil, a strie black soulignait son aveuglement. Je croyais que, dans le déroulement du mythe, Œdipe ne se crevait les yeux que bien plus tard, une fois devenu roi. Pourquoi donc avait-il déjà les yeux morts ?
The brandissait sa jambe comme un trophy en direction de la sphinx. Allait-il thunder la réponse ? C'était le moment, il était sur le point de parler, et me also j'ouvrais la bouche: à ma manière, this night, j'allais me confronter à l'énigme, j'allais ouvrir les yeux pour la résoudre.
Yannick Haenel, Bacon Blue, Stock, 2024.
I didn't want to start all over again, because this time I wasn't going to let myself get discouraged; I'd wasted too much time. It was almost one in the morning, and apart from that wonderful tap I'd been stuck to for half an hour, I hadn't seen any of Bacon's work.
My eye burned in the back of my neck. It had to end, so I turned around abruptly and saw a sphinx. That was all I needed: out of reflex, probably due to Oedipus complex, I thought I was going to be blinded again.
The Sphinx stood before a pink backdrop that splashed across the entire hall. Her head was turned toward me; an opaque layer obscured her face. My heart began to race, my throat felt like stone. As I approached her, I saw that she was shrouded in a transparent veil. Like the murderers, she had pulled a nylon stocking over her head, making her look ice-cold.
I trembled: If a veil separates life from death, on which side did I stand? Did I even still exist? After all, lying on my cot, I might only have entered the realm of the dead: I was not awake, but moving in a grave with the spirits.
The veiled gaze of the Sphinx both frightened and attracted me. I discovered that I was familiar with her secret; I perceived her whisper: she was calling to me. I say "she" because she was a Sphinx, her entire being feminine, and on her torso rose a breast whose solitude turned toward me.
A murmur rose from the other images. The colors came alive. A dune stirred up its sandstorm, and everywhere bodies moved, gray and naked, with grinning contortions that twisted their limbs. And then, as they clustered in my field of vision, as if reminded of the scent of blood, drawn to my gaze, which had just ignited my presence in their eyes, Erinyes appeared in the form of winged rats, of bats whose malevolence was beyond doubt.
With a blink, these visions mingled and formed a formless, grey veil that fell upon my eyes; but as I moved towards the Sphinx, I avoided the veil with the help of the pink light from the painting.
From that moment on, my night with bacon began. Of course, I had already been there for hours and my adventures had already taken on a certain depth, but once I overcame this first hurdle and faced Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres (1983) when I was posted, I began to exist.
I burst out laughing when I spotted Oedipus: frankly, it wasn't very appropriate to arrive at the solution to the riddle in shorts and an undershirt. His foot, which he extended toward the Sphinx, was bandaged and bleeding. A white patch of paint covered his eye, a black stripe emphasizing his blindness. I thought that, according to the myth, Oedipus only gouged out his eyes much later, after he had become king. So why did he already have dead eyes?
He swung his leg towards the Sphinx like a trophy. Would she give the answer? The time had come; she was about to speak, and I too opened my mouth: In my own way, I would face the riddle tonight, open my eyes to solve it.
Blue is an ambivalent color for Bacon: it can signify coldness, distance, and emptiness, but also a transcendent opening into another dimension. Haenel describes the experience of one of his key moments in the exhibition—gazing at Bacon's paintings. Water from a Running Tap (1982), which depicts a running tap from which blue water gushes. This image, one of Bacon's few more abstract works, becomes for Haenel a symbol of transition: Here, blue is not merely color, but a metaphor for the infinite, the incomprehensible, the flow of perception. It evokes Yves Klein's monochromes, Giotto's celestial spaces, but also the metaphorical water of baptism, purification, and oblivion. Haenel writes himself into this blue, he dissolves into it—the color becomes a literary experience. Haenel recognizes here a new quality in Bacon's art: not only destruction, but also renewal; not only decay, but also vitality. The blue of the water represents the incomprehensible, the unstoppable flow of life—and of art. The narrator wants to "drink" this blue, to immerse himself deeply in Bacon's aesthetic. Here, Haenel transcends mere interpretation and transforms Bacon's art into a lived, physical experience.
Haenel's perspective on Bacon reveals a paradox: Bacon's art is cruel, brutal, merciless—and yet it is liberating. His paintings depict the lostness of bodies, the cruelty of existence, but they are not a glorification of nothingness; rather, they are a radical affirmation of existence. A literary night journey through the inferno of Bacon's painting, showing us that art, however dark it may be, always offers an escape route—an opening into a different, more intense perception of life.
What Bacon Blue What makes Haenel's work so special is the way he not only writes about Bacon, but also uses language to performatively translate painting into art. His sentences are often intoxicating, devoid of classical structure; they explode in color, movement, and association. Just as Bacon dissolves classical perspective and places bodies in ecstatic states, Haenel stretches narrative to its limits. This is reminiscent of Bataille's écriture, of the literary excesses of a Pierre Guyotat or Jean Genet. Haenel takes Bacon's painting as an invitation to dissolve himself through writing, to surrender to color, until he himself becomes part of this flowing, breathing pictorial space.
The motif of the bull plays a special role in Bacon's later work. Study of a Bull In one of his last paintings (1991), the bull almost disappears into the darkness of the background, an allegory of death. Haenel connects this motif with a threat to sight: the bull aims its gaze directly at the viewer's eye. This scene can be read as a climax of the book. Bacon's work is a confrontation with death, with the inevitable, but also with the power of art to depict precisely that. Haenel reflects this motif in his own writing: Bacon Blue This is not a detached essay on painting, but a radical existential exploration of Bacon's art.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
