Painting Sensations

Abstract

Bacon’s paintings are images-sensations, a figurative art that composes a visual rhetoric of pathos. It is a rhetoric of sensations centred on the effects of visual signs on the spectators/viewers. The pathos is something perceptive and sensitive that happens in the spectators/viewers; it is driven, incited, provoked by Bacon’s images. The pathos is indistinctly caused by the intentional and strategic use of a visual language. The meanings of the visual signs are formed a priori and transmitted as clearly as possible in reference to a given situation, activity, event, reality/world. If this is so, the use of rhetoric is emphatic to explore the pathos instigated by Bacon’s images-sensations. Following a theoretical and conceptual approach and through the lens of Deleuze’s perspective, the aim is to show the power of visual rhetoric when provoking sensations, and to problematize the representation and report of reality as a changing process through signs/images. This is demonstrated by Bacon’s images-sensations and Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism perspective. In a semiotic perspective, Bacon’s paintings are a perfect anchorage to understand the influence of an aesthetical language and practice of image as a visual rhetoric resource, which amplify the pathos.