Texts

The Bacon Project

Listening to Francis Bacon


It was a 'bizarre' experience. In April 2021 Anne Wenzel opened one of her two kilns, prepared for – well, for what actually? Making ceramics means handling disappointments and surprises, she explained to me. A sculpture can emerge from the kiln in pieces, and glazing never turns out exactly the same or is dull where it should shine. 'An incredible number of things flop. In fact we're constantly dealing with failure here,' she says – laughing loudly at this, for if anything fails to stop her it's the unexpected. Those who take a good look at her sculptures, with their whimsical coloring and ripped-open, broken and injured forms, will see that imperfection is actually part of her repertoire.
And then?
'Then I opened the kiln,' she said, 'and sitting in it was a Bacon. I was looking. Into my kiln. At a painting. By Francis Bacon.' The astonishment can still be heard in her voice.
'That's when I thought: now I can do it.'
And she also thought: now it'll get boring.

What moves Anne Wenzel – an artist who has a thriving practice and a very personal oeuvre of large, and in recent years sometimes enormous, ceramic sculptures – to start copying the paintings of a world-famous artist? To reproduce, as faithfully as possible in clay and glaze, artworks of iconic status that were produced in a medium entirely different from her own? To do this on the scale of a table-top model, thus condemning herself to 'fussing and finicking'? Why would you want such an objective? How does that work, what do you discover, what do you learn from it?
With these questions in mind, I make two visits to the Rotterdam studio of Anne Wenzel in the spring of 2021. Situated in the district Charlois, it comprises a complex of spaces, small warehouses actually. Grey spring skies hurry along over the Waalhaven, just behind this, over a desolate little playground and the nineteenth-century neighborhood that begins on the other side of the street. The building, packed in a corrugated exterior, is wedged between a cleaning company and a business that sells stockfish. At the side a truck can back up to a rolling door for the loading and unloading of her large, fragile works.

Work, hard work, takes place here. Every year Wenzel and her three assistants prepare about ten exhibitions or projects here, or she travels around the world to install her work in museums, at art fairs or in public space. She loves it: putting in long days, developing new series of sculptures, solving complicated technical problems, then having a good party and, when time permits, having an occasional go at the punching bag that awaits her in the storage space. Also important: letting her voice be heard in discussions on culture, for the sake of Rotterdam's art scene as well as the country's cultural climate.
That's how it has been going for about the past twenty-five years. That compressed energy can be seen in her work, and in Wenzel's compact stature. In her quick, deliberate movements; her restless and meandering use of language, where pleasant traces of German can be heard. And in her laugh, which cracks through the space like a whip.

But then, yes: along came the coronavirus in March 2020.
'My life changed drastically,' says Wenzel, sitting at the main table in her spacious studio. 'For the first time my agenda was completely blank. Here at the studio we went from all to nothing – that's quite a difference. And I thought it was awful. My assistants weren't there, everything had come to a halt. After two weeks I found myself buying vegetables just to see someone.'
But she soon realized: this is also a gift. 'Suddenly I had time. And I thought: I've got to use that time well. It just dropped in my lap now, so I'm going to do something I've had in the back of my mind for a long time: I'll start with that Bacon.'


SPACE

In 2018 and in 2019 Anne Wenzel had visited retrospectives on the painter Francis Bacon (1909-1992) in Basel and Paris. Those were not her first. Although Wenzel claims to have little affinity with painting, the artist had been fascinating her for some time. 'In Paris I had the chance to see a great many Bacons in one place. For me it wasn't about the individual works. As I walked through the exhibition, I was sooner scanning them, trying to understand what exactly the essence of that work is. And suddenly I had this vision – that may sound a bit strange, but even so: a vision that this was about things other than what we see or how it's painted. I jotted this down...wait a second...' She grabs her phone, scrolls through her notes and, sure enough, there it is, what she wrote two years ago.
She lists tersely: 'Define spaces with metal rods.’
'Colored surfaces behind works'.
'Colored planes above and below works'.
'Mirrors reflect, break through the spaces'. And adds: ‘Body/flesh: model 1:1'.
What she jotted down at that moment was no analysis, says Wenzel, but the very opposite: what she didn't understand. That old note to herself tells her that she is interested in the way Bacon situates his figures in space, even though those spaces are sometimes illogical or inconceivable. 'It's precisely that incomprehension that I find so unbelievably fascinating.'
Wenzel: 'I also look at other artists throughout history, to learn something from them. With Brancusi, for instance, I observe how he develops sculptures, stacking one segment upon another – but it goes no further than study, since I wouldn't do that myself.' This time it would be different. In order to fathom the space in Bacon's work, she literally had to create that space. Because, as Wenzel puts it, 'to use the old adage: making is thinking '.


MATERIAL

Working from two into three dimensions is easier said than done. When the flat surface is translated into a spatial image, the questions and problems come parading into the studio like troops in formation.
A two-dimensional image has, for instance, no back side – how do you continue into a place where eye no longer reaches? Secondly, a painted or photographed space is framed. Where does the space stop? Where do the lines, the walls, the floors stop if you don't have that boundary? And what scale do you choose? Another matter: a painter isn't hampered by gravity or physics. Bacon can hang a lump of flesh from ropes, as though it's a trapeze artist, and he can effortlessly make an angular space merge with a round one, because a painting has no real, physical depth.
And then, too, comes the issue as to the material. What did Bacon suggest with his paint: flesh, wood, metal, curtains, movement, shafts of light, screaming? How would that be translated? How do you remain as faithful as possible to the depiction but prevent this from becoming illustration? What has more, and less, importance?
Anne Wenzel: 'When you look at a work, you're dealing with an artist's composition...the eye is guided along. But when you model you're dealing with a nonhierarchical structure; working, in fact, everywhere at the same time. The nice thing about clay is that you can add it, remove it, make holes in it...that's how you seek out the form. So when you're making a work, you experience it very differently than when you're looking at it. And along the way choices need to be made constantly.'
This looking, making and choosing is what Anne Wenzel calls listening to Bacon. 'Bacon is my anchor. He leads the way. That allows me to work faster, since I don't need to conceive anything, just interpret things. And I do that on a manageable scale: no reinforcement of the ceiling is needed as it is, for example, when you're hanging four hundred kilos of clay from it.'
'What's particularly difficult at the same time, though, is that Bacon forces me to invent solutions to things that I would never want to resolve. For instance: he places a yellow oval spot in the middle of the image, something I'd never do. Now I do need to do that, since I'm following Bacon's lead. So at that point I have to reflect: is it a hole? Is it a stain? An object? I turned it into a little yellow oval that sort of floats in front.' (The Bacon Project (Triptych 1976, right panel))
These considerations come up all the time – is a stroke of paint a ray of light or a curtain; does a line make a twist or a curve; are those abstract objects surrounding Bacon's figures flat or do they have depth?
Wenzel and her assistants, having meanwhile returned to the studio with certain conditions, began to experiment with other materials. Metal, fabric, silicon, enamel, perspex – some things just don't lend themselves to interpretation in ceramics. For this Wenzel went back to her youth.
'I really had a 1970s upbringing. Back then a child was supposed to be creative. At home we worked through the entire Grosse Ravenburger Hobbybuch.' She pulls out the book. 'Look, all of this I did as a kid. Batik, dripping candlewax, making straw figures, dipping wire figures in paint, enameling...Schmelzgranulat, that was the absolute limit, a whole baking tray full of melting plastic. That stuff stank, pretty intense it was. Letting something cool off on a sheet of asbestos wouldn't be done anymore either.'
But most of the techniques are still in use, she says. And especially without the eyes of collectors or curators, without pressure in 'the vacuum created by the virus', there was a sense of great freedom. The artist holds up little bags with delicate scraps of silk, various types of wire, silicon, test sheets of perspex.
'All those things make me so happy. It's actually play, super-serious playing. When I was at art school (AKI in Enschede) during the 1990s, director Sipke Huismans gave a welcome speech every year to the first-year students, encouraging them with great earnestness to 'play like children'. Every year we, the older ones, would go back to hear that speech, because he was in fact more or less explaining the essence of art. It was wonderful to listen to that.'
'Before that, too, I understood the importance of playing, but there's often a lack of time. Playing is concentrated; it has an inner logic which is very serious and yet doesn't need to make sense. You take something very seriously, but it doesn't have to comply with anything. That's truly fantastic.'


BACON SPEAKS

By way of this process the artist received, from 2020 to 2021, 'instruction in the classical manner from Francis Bacon' – an artist who has been dead for nearly thirty years now. Her learning material was initially immense: an entire body of work. The choice of twelve works came about gradually. Eventually she worked from large photocopies from her Bacon catalogues which, covered with post-its and scribblings, ended up all over the studio: on her work tables, on the floor, next to the kiln, among the glaze test tiles. She did not read what he said about his own work or what others wrote about it.
Firmly: 'None of that matters to me. You have to see it as a visual dialogue. It's a visual investigation, a visual analysis and thus a visual conversation as well. It's more than an investigation of form, which is how it could also be regarded.'
'I started this series with the modelling of figures. That relates to my work – despite the fact that I suddenly had to make all these incredibly muscular male arms and asses, that was new to me. I learned a great deal about Bacon's comprehension of anatomy, of equilibrium, balance. Also about his raw aspects, his love of men, about violence and sex, all in fact by way of making. At a certain point I managed to grasp that. Then I deliberately looked for a Bacon that had more 'surroundings', which I didn't know how to resolve.'
She shows me The Bacon Project (Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey). A bloody carcass is suspended in a construction of thin lines; in the foreground a bird escapes a second, smaller cage. A mysterious orange, transparent surface hovers in the space. This is a complicated image, full of riddles.
Wenzel: 'I happen to know that I've got a pretty good capacity to think spatially. But here...a cage construction, I would always make that with parallel ribs. Bacon doesn't do that, he creates spaces that have a logical appearance but are perspectivally truly impossible. Furthermore, he allows the bird in the foreground to be pierced by the construction. I made an error in the translation of the image, modelling the bird too far backward, which meant that I either had to confine the bird or have the cage end up differently. So I hadn't listened very well.'
There again: listened. She doesn't say: hadn't looked at it very well.
'No, I call that listening, since Bacon is telling me something. That's an interesting point; connotatively, after all, it makes a big difference whether you cage a bird within lines or let it escape and, at the same time, get skewered. So when I make a mistake in the formal translation, the meaning of the image changes!'
And then the spaces: what lingers on due to the photographs and stories from Bacon's famous studio is the image of an artist on the edge, who frequently returned home heavily bruised after a night on the town, thrived in a humus layer of trampled photographs and articles, who wiped his brushes off on the curtains.
Wenzel: 'People like that romantic image. And that, too, is how he was: he did have violent relationships, his studio was chaotic, and then the alcohol. But he was also a professionally occupied artist who was very aware of what he projected to the outside world. His paintings are in fact really very...tidy. There is a clear structure, a great deal of background; there is structure and repetition and every brushstroke, though it may seem so casual, is extremely accurate. By copying I discover how much organization there is in his spaces.'


DEVELOPMENT

An investigation of form, yes, precisely so that steps can be made in terms of content. That, in Wenzel's view, is often underestimated.
'That strange distinction is always made between visual and conceptual art; as if when something is visual, it can no longer be a concept. Whereas I think, and Bacon convinces me of this, that a good work of art is both. A visual object is a concept.'
That teaches her a lot about her own practice, she says. 'Ordinarily I always depart from a connotative issue, and the form arises from this. For example: I want to do something with symbols of power. I immerse myself in William of Orange, in the Dutch East India Company. What's the deal with those other men, were they heroes or in fact barbarians? Can we, from today's perspective, make judgments about this? First comes the content and ensuing from that is the language of form, which I proceed to investigate in a series of sculptures.'
'Now, with the copying of the Bacons, I realize that it's an opposite process. First become acquainted with the language of forms, and after that comes the content. That's what makes this project so different for me. That it hasn't started with a connotative view or issue and not with politics or art history, but with the form.'
The only sculpture in the series whose content instantly hits you in the face is also Bacon's most famous painting: the screaming pope. Only later in the series did Anne Wenzel begin working on The Bacon Project (Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X). While the other works of Bacon scarcely involve any references beyond his own world, this work is all reference. To art history, to religion, to scandal, blasphemy. Furthermore, the painting has iconic status; as an artist you could easily burn your fingers on this. Wenzel: 'With this work, yes, art history is watching. On top of that, it's a difficult work in the formal sense. On looking back at the series now, I first concerned myself with the figure here. Then the space. And once I got a grasp of that, once everything began to feel right, I focused on the brushstroke. With this pope it is, contrary to that in most of Bacon's work, a very expressive stroke. It has swiftness, it's absolutely a gesture. But in ceramics things work very differently. Things are slower, things dry faster; a gesture like that quickly gets far too harsh. So now I had to model more expressively, and work along with Bacon.'
The glazing, too, was a very different story here. In her work she had already used colored glaze in a fairly painterly manner, in which the colors are often independent of the forms.
'This Bacon project really brought that to the next level,' she says. 'The glazing became a really strange combination of painting and sculpting. A veritable explosion of color took place – I expanded my palette of colors immensely. It has even made me decide that my glaze library, which I've spent the past twenty years developing, should be organized in an entirely different way.

And then came that strange moment, while the pope was between two stages of glazing, when another sculpture emerged from the kiln. The Bacon Project (Triptych 1970, left panel). A work that had already surprised Wenzel earlier, as she copied it, because it involves a figure which floats in space (and thus needs to be hung) and which, after she had translated it from a depiction into a three-dimensional image in clay, turned out to have a perfect center of gravity. Now it was also glazed and fired again. And staring at her when she opened the kiln, after a year of plodding away and exploring, failing and starting anew, was a true Bacon.
Wenzel: 'Now it's going to get boring, I thought. Boring in the sense that: most of the problems have now been solved by me as the maker. For even though this series is totally different from my other work, I do recognize the process. I begin with a problem, an insanely exciting period. I start to explore, analyze, and that continues with sculpture two, three, four. Then comes a phase when I begin to grasp it: five, six, seven, eight, nine...and then, in the last few sculptures, I start to have a command of it. If I were working commercially, that's when I'd start production,' – out comes another roar of laughter – 'but that's when I'd get bored.'
For the sake of clarity: she needs every component of such a series. The first sculpture is as important to her as the last. 'That,' she says, 'is what makes a series breathe.'


AFTER BACON

Anne Wenzel was able to undertake The Bacon Project 'because it didn't matter if I'd fail,' she says. 'Nobody knew about it, nobody was looking over my shoulder. Especially that initial phased I experienced as an artistic explosion. Very fruitful. So no matter how much I do long to return to the life of travel and exhibiting and excitement – I must manage to hang on to the extra value of that bubble, that vacuum.' She and her husband, artist Eric Jan van de Geer, bought a house on the Elbe in Germany, which should serve as such a place of refuge.
Now the series is finished, but it's still too early for Wenzel to look back on it. 'Super complex' she calls it, even simply due to the question as to whose images these actually are. Hers? Bacon's?
'And Bacon belongs, in turn, to many others; he's really an artist's artist. It was so interesting to see what happened when, after progressing further with the series, I posted photographs of the process on social media. Ordinarily I get either compliments or no comments at all. But this time, with those Bacons, everyone had an opinion about them. People began giving me advice about the use of material, speculating as to whether or not it would 'succeed'...I got the impression that men, in particular, felt I was treading on their territory, that I was messing around with one of their heroes – ha!' The laugh, there it is again.
Then, more seriously: 'When this pandemic started everyone was saying: we have to learn from the virus. I never believe that, since I'm responsible only for what I myself learn. In my life and in my art. What's good about it, what could be better, in what direction am I going? That's what times like these are good for.' She gets out another sculpture, from the middle of the series based on Three Figures in a Room from 1964. A male nude; as often with Bacon, a kind of disintegrating body, leaning backward on a royal blue piece of furniture.
'In the final stage I just let the glaze drip nicely over this, as I would have had done before. I know how it works and yes, it looks good. But that idea came from my old box of tricks. While the objective was, in fact, to take new paths.'
Wenzel is certain that, in the future, her work will change as a result of this close reading of Bacon's work. She walks over to a big crate, shoves the plastic covering aside, shows a new sculpture. A large bovine head for which she, for the first time, modelled a pedestal onto it, making it an integral part of the sculpture. And she dreams about a floating sculpture. A wish, put off for years, which has become much more conceivable after listening to Bacon.
New options for tackling questions have come about, and that's how routineness is avoided.
Anne Wenzel: 'That is more fundamental than making new sculptures or inventing new forms. I've learned how not to keep on resorting to solutions from my 'default menu', a range of solutions that I've developed over twenty-five years. And that's the most difficult thing. To let that go.’


Sacha Bronwasser, April 2021