FRANCIS BACON: MOVEMENT, MUSCULARITY, MUYBRIDGE

The powerful and brilliant Francis Bacon exhibit at the MET is coming to a close this weekend.  There are many gripping aspects to Bacon's brush work, but the one that draws me the most is his phenomenal riffs off the stop action  photography of Eadweard Muybridge's close studies of human movement.  In a small painting of blue and grey, a nude male figure stands in a diving pose: arms raised above his head- poised to plunge into the depths of a murky beyond.  The painting is breath taking in its clarity of depth and the lure of the beyond.  The body of the diver is ethereal and mortal, sculpted and dreamlike, a figment of a brush stroke, and a rivetting piece of visualization.  One remains in the wake of the diver's momentum about to plunge into the abyss of oblivion.  Bacon used many of Muybridge's photographs to break down the structure and velocity of movement into its fundamental rhythm.  A figure crouches within a field of matrixed lines, another figure explodes out of an orange canvas constrained by a cage of lines.  All signal a deeper preoccupation with the slowing down of time and decay in Bacon's neural investigations into the nature of motion.