The brutality of fact: Violence, disappearance and the promise of oblivion in the art of Francis Bacon

This essay addresses the violence of disappearance and oblivion in the artwork of Francis Bacon. Drawing upon the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and wider thinking on the aesthetics of violence, the paper argues that the real violence in Bacon is to attend to the violence of the void. Having explained the theoretical basis for this, the essay proceeds to provide a critique of the violence of disappearance in a technological age, noting how the lines between spectacle and absence are not always strategically opposed. The essay ends with a mediation on delirium and the desire to author ones own disappearance through the seduction of the nihilism of the technological gaze.