I received my copy of SeeAllThis Magazine in the mail this week. The publishers approached me some time ago with interest in including a piece of my work in the issue, this large one that I produced for a solo exhibition that I put on at K Contemporary Art. It is a pile of meat of individual pieces extracted from Dutch still life paintings. I was really interested when they mentioned the concept of meat and flesh and this fine one between humans and animals, as this is very much something that I have been considering with my new work, as well as the old. I find that others are sometimes better able than I to put these concepts into the best words.
The work of Francis Bacon opens the issue, an artist whose work I admire greatly. His work is brave and shocking, particularly then and even still now. It has an edge in the way that he shows our animal nature in an unattractive, savage light. He focuses on our inner bodies, our inner physical selves: “Behind our fragile bodies and paper-thin skins glowing with apparent health while, hidden inside, our real life goes unseen. The uncertainty, the doubts, the despair, the self-hate, the guts, the garbage.” Our internal struggles and the imaginary beings that we are.