The Logic of Sensation

pg 32

"…Bacon constantly says that sensation is what passes from one "order" to another, from on "level" to another, from one "area" to another. This is why sensation is the master of deformations, the agent of bodily deformations. In this regard, the same criticism can be made against both figurative painting and abstract painting: they pass through the brain, they do not act directly on the nervous system, they do not attain the sensation, they do not liberate the Figure - all because they remain at one and the same level."

pg 39

"This ground, this rhythmic unity of the senses, can be discovered only by going beyond the organism."

pg 45

"Painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation. The color system itself is a system of direct action on the nervous system."

…

"Abjection becomes splendor; the horror of life becomes a very pure and very intense life. 'Life is frightening,' said Cezanne, but in this cry he had already given voice to all the joys of line and color. Painting transmutes this cerebral pessimism into nervous optimism. Painting is hysteria, or converts hysteria, because it makes presence immediately visible, but it does not treat you as a fixed organ. It liberates lines and colors from their representative function, but at the same time it also liberates the eye from its adherence to the organism, from its character as a fixed and qualified organ: the eye becomes virtually the polyvalent indeterminate organ that sees the body without organs (the Figure) as a pure presence."

pg 82-83

"There are two ways in which the painting can fail, once visually and once manually. One can remain entangled in the figurative givens and the optical organization of representation; but one can also spoil the diagram, botch it, so overload it that it is rendered inoperative (which is another way of remaining in the figurative: one will have simply mutilated or mauled the cliche…). The diagram is thus the operative set of signifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches. And the operation of the diagram, its function, says Bacon, is to be "suggestive." Or, more rigorously, to use language similar to Wittgenstein's, it is to introduce "possibilities of fact." Because they are destined to give us the Figure, it is all the more important for the traits and color-patches to break with figuration. This is why they are not sufficient in themselves, but must be "utilized." They mark out possibilities of fact, but do not yet constitute a fact (the pictorial fact). In order to be converted into a fact, in order to evolve into a Figure, they must be reinjected into the visual whole; but it is precisely through the action of these marks that the visual whole will cease to be an an optical organization; it will give the eye another power, as well as an object that will no longer be figurative.

The diagram is the operative set of traits and color-patches, of lines and zone. Van Gogh's diagram, for example, is the set of straight and curved hatch marks that raise and lower the ground, twist trees make the sky palpitate. . ."

"3 great paths": 

1.

pg 84

"Abstract optical space has no need of the tactile connections that classical representation was still organizing. But it follows that what abstract painting elaborates is less a diagram than a symbolic code, on the basis of great formal oppositions. It replaced the diagram with a code."

pg 85

"It is the code that is responsible for answering the question of painting today: what can save man from the "abyss," from external tumult and manual chaos? Open up a spiritual state for the man of the future, a man without hands. Restore man to a pure and optical space, which will perhaps be made up exclusively of horizontal and vertical. "Modern man seeks rest because he is deafened by the external." The hand is reduced to a key board that presses on an internal optical keyboard."

2.

"A second path, often named abstract expressions or art informal, offerers an entirely different response, at the opposite extreme of abstraction. This time the abyss or chaos is deployed to the maximum. Somewhat like a map this is a large as the country, the diagram merges with the totality of the painting, the entire painting is diagrammatic. Optical geometry disappears in favor of manual line, exclusively manual. The eye has difficulty following it. The incomparable discovery of this kind of painting is that of a line (and a patch of color) that does not form a contour, that delimits nothing, neither inside or outside, neither concave nor convex: Pollock's line, Morris Louis's stain. . . this radical manner of escaping the figurative, we will find them overtime a great painter of the past stopped painting things in order "to painting between things." Turner's late watercolors conquer not only all the forces of impressionism, but also the power of an explosive line without outline or contour, which makes the painting itself an unparalleled catastrophe (rather than illustrating the catastrophe romantically)."

pg 86

"But with Pollock, this line-trait and this color-patch will be pushed to their functional limit: no longer the transformation of the form but a decomposition of matter, which abandons us to its lineaments and granulations. The painting thus becomes a catastrophe-painting and a diagram-painting at one and the same time.

…

Here it is no longer an inner vision that gives us the infinite, but a manual power that is spread out "all over," from one edge of the painting to the other."

3. 

pg 88

"…Why did Bacon not become involved in either of the two preceding paths? . . . One the one hand, he is not attracted to paintings that tend to substitute a visual and spiritual code for the involuntary diagram (even if there is an exemplary attitude on the part of the artist). The code is inevitably cerebral and lacks sensation, the essential reality of the fall, that is, the direct action upon the nervous system. Kandinsky defined abstract painting by "tension." but according to Bacon tension is what abstract painting lacks the most. By internalizing tension in the optical form, abstract painting neutralizes it. Finally, because it is abstract, the code can easily become a simple symbolic coding of the figurative. One the other hand, Bacon is not drawn to abstract expressionism, or to the power and mystery of the line without contour. This is because the diagram covers the entire painting, he says, and because its proliferation creates a veritable "mess." . . . sensation is indeed attained, but it remains in an irremediably confused state. Bacon will beaver stop speaking of the absolute necessity of preventing the diagram from proliferating, the moments of the act of painting. He thinks that, in this domain of irrational train and the line without contour, Michaux went further than Pollock, precisely because he remains a master of the diagram."

. . .

"The diagram must not eat away at the entire painting; it must remain limited in space and time. It must remain operative and controlled. The violent methods must not be given free rein, and the necessary catastrophe must not submerge the whole. The diagram is the possibility of fact–it is not the Fact itself. Not all the figurative givens have to disappear; and above all, a new figuration, that of the Figure, should emerge from the diagram and make sensation clear and precise." 

pg 91

"… the diagram connects these two moment indissolubly: the geometry is its "frame" and color is the sensation, the "coloring sensation." The diagram is exactly what Cezanne called the motif. In effect, the motif is made up of two things, the sensation and the frame. It is their intertwining. A sensation, even a coloring sensation, is ephemeral and confused, lacking duration and clarity. (hence the critique of impressionism). But the frame suffices even less: it is abstract/ The geometry must be made concrete or felt, and at the same time the sensation must be given duration and clarity."

pg 93

"… painting elevates color and lines to the state of language, it is an analogical language. One might even wonder if painting has not always been an analogical language pare excellence. When we speak of analogical language in animals, we do not consider their possible songs, which belong to a different domain; rather we are essentially concerned with cries, variable colors, and line (attitudes, postures)."

"One could define the analogical by a certain obviousness or "evidence", by a certain presence that makes itself felt immediately, whereas the digital needs to be learned . . . the analogical requires an apprenticeship as well, even in animals, although it is a different type of apprenticeship than the acquisition of the digital. The very existence of painting would be enough to confirm the necessity of a lengthy apprenticeship for the analogical to become language."

pg 97

"As an analogical, painting has three dimensions: the planes,  the connection or junction of places (primary of the vertical plane and the horizontal plane), which replaces perspective; color; the modulation of color, which tends to suppress relations of value, chiaroscuro, and the contrast of shadow and light; and the body, the mass and declination of the body, which exceeds the organism and destroys the form-background relationship. There is a triple liberation here–of the body, of the planes, and of color (for what enslaves color is not only contour but also the contrast of values). Now this liberation can only occur by passing through the catastrophe, that is, through the diagram and its involuntary irruption: bodies are thrown off balance, they are in a state of perpetual fall; the planes collide with each other; colors become confused and no longer delimit an object. In order for the rupture with figurative resemblance to avoid perpetuating the catastrophe, in order for it to succeed in producing a more profound resemblance, the planes, starting with the diagram, must maintain their junction; the body's mass must integrate the imbalance in a deformation (neither transformation nor decomposition, but the "place" of a force); and above all, modulation must find its true meaning and technical formula as the law of Analogy. It must act as a variable and continuos mold, which is not simply opposed to relief in chiaroscuro, but invents a new type of relief through color. And perhaps this modulation of color is Cezanne's principal operation. By substituting for relations of value and juxtaposition of tints brought together in the order of the spectrum, modulation will define a double movement of expansion and contraction: expansion in which the planes, and especially the horizontal and the vertical planes, are connected and even merged in depth; and at the same time, a contraction through which everything is restored to the body, to the mass, as a function of a point of imbalance of a fall. It is through such a system that geometry become sensible, and sensations become clear and durable: one has "realized" the sensation, says Cezanne. Or, following Bacon's formula, one has passed from the possibility of fact to the Fact, from the diagram to the painting."

"The diagram, the agents of analogical language, acts not as a code but as a modulator: The diagram and its involuntary manual order will have been used to break all the figurative coordinates; but it is through this very action (when it is operative) that it defines possibilities of fact, by liberating lines for the armature and colors for modulation. Lines and colors are then able to constituted the Figure or the Fact, that is, to produce the new resemblance inside the visual whole, where the diagram must operate and be realized."

pg 105

"It is a manual space, a space of active, manual strokes, which works through manual aggregates rather than through luminous disaggregation. One also finds in Michelangelo a power that stems directly from this manual space, namely the manner in which the body exceeds the organism or makes it fall apart. It is as if the organisms were caught up in a whirling or serpentine movement that gives them a single "body" or unites them in a single "fact," apart from any figurative or narrative connection."