Around #10 and #11 of the series, I painted a dense border on the four sides in vivid colors in order to bring the square into relief—creating the figure from the outside, or defining the ground after the fact. When I saw the surface that had thus come into being, I understood: this is what Bacon was doing.
The random and the flat—accidents and inevitability—come to represent life and death. Life intensifies death, and death intensifies life. The reason why flesh in Francis Bacon’s paintings appears so visceral is precisely that it is enclosed within color fields of death. I call squares made through this method “Baconian Squares.”
