a slice of bacon

last weekend we did a 'guided philosophical tour' at the Gemeentemuseum, the Hague, looking at some of the paintings from their modern collection while trying to establish why they are called 'modern', what modernity meant then and now, and how the different ways of making art have expanded and changed after that era. (somewhere around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century)
viewed work of my favourite painters, like Cézanne, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Appel and to my great delight we finished with a room full of Bacon's works....!

here i am, in my scooter, reflected in Bacon's 'Paralytic Child Walking on all Fours, after Muybridge'.
Bacon wanted all his paintings to be shown behind glass, which many people (including me) at first find somewhat distracting, but this layered image wouldn't have been possible without the glass.....
found a great documentary about Bacon, where he explains why he needs this glass barrier between his work and the viewer:

"by glass, you cut the paintings away from their surroundings, and by 'glazing' them i feel it gives an added depth and texture to the quality of the type of paint that i use. i couldn't do the particular kind of thing that i'm trying to do, which is to make a chaos in an isolated area, with varnished pictures or other type of paint (....) i don't want the reflections to be there, i feel that they should be 'put up with'.... i feel that, because of the very 'flat' way i paint, the glass helps to unify the picture. i also like the distance between what has been done, and the onlooker, that the glass creates. i like, as it were, the removal of the object as far as possible (.....) in many ways they (the paintings) are more difficult to see, but you can still look into them. it's he distance....that this thing is shut away from the spectator....."

fascinating, eh? in my photograph you can clearly see the depth added by the reflections, they create another layer in which the painting is continued and expanded. i am an extended part of the paralytic child, reflecting its disability and deformity,  the rectangular shape of the white window in the painting continues both in the reflections of Bacon's other work hanging on the back wall, and of the tiled ceiling above. last but not least is Bruce Nauman's Carousel , reflecting the abusive way the world  treats 'deviants' and animals. it is almost as if the paralytic child is crawling on the Carousel's ropes, while an imaginary crowd beyond the frame is watching with a creepy kind of awe and curiosity, waiting for it to fall....

this image is sooc (straight out of camera), just cropped it into a square and did some basic adjustments.
i used another of the shots i took during the tour to create this layered image

it is Bacon's 'Man in Blue I', with reflections of "Diptych; Study from the Human Body"  and a corner of Nauman's Carousel. i added several layers of my 'dark dude', silhouette of a headless manikin reflecting me taking the shot, as a repetition of the figure walking away through the doorway on the left.
think i would like to have these images printed, 'glazed' and hung together as a diptych...... what do you think?