In
Bleu Bacon,
Yannick Haenel mobilizes all the resources of language to transmute his text into a painting displaying all shades of blue, from cobalt to king.
Invited to spend a night at the Center Pompidou, in Paris, during the Bacon en tous lettres
exhibition ,
in 2019, he recounts an initiatory adventure which takes him back to his African childhood as well as to the aphrodisiac character of literature and painting, in a work which joins the sensitive and the intellect, the visible and the invisible, what we contemplate and what we listen to, in a completely Rimbaldian synaesthesia.
Or how to transcend the brutality of Francis Bacon into a strange and paradoxical gentleness...
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Madame Figaro.
– What relationship do you have with painting
?
Yannick Haenel.
– A passionate relationship.
I have dedicated a book to Caravaggio, another to Adrian Ghenie, and not a week goes by without me going to a gallery or a museum.
I can take a train to go see a painting again in Rouen, Strasbourg or Dijon, and I have a predilection for so-called violent paintings, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Bacon.
These artists do not like human violence as such, but they like to strip it bare and exhibit it in its instantaneous form.
Painting has long been supposed to represent an eternal fresco, great ideals, gestures that last, but these painters are worked by the idea of the elusive, and more precisely, in Bacon, of the moment of death , as in George Dyer's triptych, in front of which I remained for more than an hour, admiring it as well as enduring it.
Painting offers an initiation, like music: it is language without words.
Visiting paintings is for me tablets of life, and painting, the permanent school of nuance.
Did you accept the offer of a night at the museum because it was Bacon
?
Yes, and because it allowed me to realize a fantasy: being alone, finally, with a painting – or, in this case, forty-two.
To bypass the tumultuous bustle of exhibitions which prevents us from being truly present and open to the works.
Not without difficulty, moreover, because I experienced the influence that Bacon exerts.
This night was a sensory adventure.
I was seized by an ophthalmic migraine faced with the overload caused by the contemplation of his art, a bit like a sort of Stendhal syndrome, and I preferred to think of this incident as the first application of Bacon on my body, and there again, like an initiation: you will lose your sight to see better.
His painting burns the retina and my hope, it is only after two hours of relative blindness that I will manage to make myself available.
I believe that there is a thickening of sensitivity that makes it difficult to be alone with what we love and those we love.
The device invented by the
My Night at the Museum
collection required me because it gave me the time to let myself be caught up in Bacon's violence, whereas if I had seen the exhibition on an ordinary afternoon, my phone would have rung, I would have thought about the next meeting, I would have told myself that I was going to write an article... There, I was taken by what is hostile, demonic, nihilistic in Bacon's painting - an aspect of his work that fascinates me but otherwise doesn't please me so much.
You are more of a mystic…
I am looking for fountains to drink from.
And that's why I chose to see Bacon from another side, under the sign of blue, because at certain moments of the night, I was seized, because I was thirsty for it and I I wanted, by this squirt, this flow, this extraordinarily vitalist character of Bacon of which we speak little, because he himself orchestrated his legend by putting himself on stage dead drunk, talking about anguish and "meat" to resume his words, about which Gilles Deleuze wrote extraordinary pages.
Bacon declared that, passing restaurants and carcasses hanging from hooks, he saw himself in their place.
It's a whole tradition, from Rembrandt to Soutine, that interests me, but there, I had access, thanks to the fluid chaos of the night, to something else... What I liked about this night, then in writing is the possibility of moving from joy to depression before returning to openness to the world, of no longer controlling things, of letting polarities collide.
This is what Bacon invites – we cannot remain at a scholarly, cynical or recreational distance from such a complex art, we must be prepared to pay the price.
The night allows for all sorts of deviations, until the enchantment of the last part...
Here we find themes from your previous book,
Le Trésorier-payeur,
which appears in Folio
: sacrifice, expense and sex...
I wrote it just after seeing the exhibition, in fact, and more profoundly, the erogenous nature of sentences is for me the great thing that joins the passionate interest in painting: turning on lights with words, raising the register of writing until it becomes a sort of luminous performance, until writing almost childish of the
Treasurer-paymaster,
idealistic hero disguised as a banker, through whom I paradoxically praise spending.
Now, Bacon is someone who, in his ethos, never stopped exerting himself.
The physical expenditure, the desire for prodigality and ruin for him are not an interlude, in my opinion, but a way of remaining at the height of what is happening in a senseless and enlightened way when he paints.
As if the fallout was so terrible that it was necessary to restore oneself to a form of intoxication by all means.
From noon until the middle of the night, Bacon spent his time drinking and partying with friends, in an almost athletic way...
Painting offers an initiation, like music: it is language without words
Yannick Haenel
Why do you link blue to the erotic?
I am thinking of a painting,
The Wrestlers,
dating from 1953, where Bacon masked, through a wrestling scene, a sexual relationship.
You have to imagine the effect produced at this time in Great Britain, especially since the character at the bottom, with a grimace of enjoyment on his face, is immediately recognizable: it is Bacon.
He offers himself making love in front of the art world and his country.
This painting, offered to Lucian Freud, captivates me because I do not see it at all as a provocation but an invitation to enter the chamber of pleasures.
Besides that it shows a line of the lover's back, from above, absolutely marvelous, ice blue-white.
With this spine painted like the crest of a mountain, emerges, at the place where the two bodies connect, something both explosive and modest: royal blue.
For such a demonstrative painter, it is no small thing to choose to represent the unfigurable of sex with great violence... but also with great delicacy.
With this text, I modestly invite you to see the blue beneath the carcasses.
Faced with animals, humans, everything that decays, there is a form of sorrow and pity in Bacon.
“Bleu Bacon”, by Yannick Haenel, Éditions Stock, “My Night at the Museum” collection, 227 p., €19.50.
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