It's the contour, stupid!

[Saturday 8 November]

On the left: Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Valazquez. On the right, Francis Bacon's Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

Late-night note (I once went to a talk that Jonathan Safran-Foer gave about his novels, and he said that what separates the writer from the non-writer is that former goes through the trouble of actually writing down all of those brilliant ideas that always seem to enter one's mind as one lies waiting to fall asleep, or something to that effect, which struck a chord; ever since, I've made sure to always have pen and paper waiting next to my bed) on architecture and the discussion of Deleuze's reading of Bacon: in his translator's introduction to  "Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation," Daniel W. Smith writes that "Deleuze frequently returns to the three simplest aspects of Bacon’s paintings—the Figure, the surrounding fields of color, and the contour that separates the two—which taken together form a 'highly precise system' that serves to isolate the Figure in Bacon’s paintings". Now, if what we're looking for is the local iconicities within 'the unfolding of spaces over time,' and if we're looking for a way of expressing that through focusing on the corner, then really it may be that we shouldn't be so concerned with the figure, but rather with the contour that separates one space from the next. Is this just a contrived way of saying 'surface,' or is there something more to this distinction? The figure in Bacon is the human body, the figure in architecture is the space, the void, the contained. Deleuze views Bacon's body as one 'without organs' that is deformed or contracted by the forces that contort it. The body wants out of its skin. When we open a corner, the space flows through that corner; a space without organs? Hm, or maybe I should just go back to modelling - not to mention get a bit of sleep - instead?