Francis Bacon, Water from a Running Tap (1982)

an "abstraction" that no longer has any need of the Figure. The Figure is dissipated by realising the prophecy: you will no longer be anything but sand, grass, dust, or a drop of water.' In these and similar paintings the figure leaves only an indefmite or virtual trace of its former presence, and 'the scrambled or wiped-off zone, which used to make the Figure emerge, will now stand on its own, independent of every definite form, appearing as a pure Force without an object: the wind of the tempest, the jet of water or vapour, the eye of the hurricane .. .' (FB, 84-5, 31). .

At this point Bacon's painting, like Ozu's cinema, attains the fully counter-actua1ised intensity of an any-space-whatever. In such a space the expression of intensity 'reaches the absolute, as instances of pure contemplation, and immediately brings about the identity of the mental and the physical, the real and the imaginary, the subject and the object, the world and the l' (C2, 16).