"Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all."
-- final sentence of Breton's Nadja
Bacon's figures writhe convulsively, but above all that erotic connection links the painter with his subjects. After all, for Breton too convulsive beauty has clearly erotic connotations - it is effectively the equivalent of being overwhelmed by love. Despite the spatial constructions in which Bacon places his figures they still seem to live and breathe. This is the standard for what art in the twentieth century could achieve: depicting the individual in the moment of disintegration. The form becomes amorphous and filled with life in its liquefaction, but in the process it loses everything that distinguishes it and separates it from unstructured matter. In his painting Bacon repeatedly attempts to find precisely this point at which the process of dying and reviving, of obtaining and destroying form, of becoming and dying, intersect, merge, and become indistinguishable.
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