Never meet the eyes of a vampire. He will steal your soul with one bite of his gaze. Rough, cold, sharp. Voracious of the intimacy that you hide, just like the real characters of whom Lucian Freud (1922-2011) portrayed the age of her crude nudity. But it was not the temperature of the bodies, the thickness of the blood under the filling of his still lifes of human carnality, what he only pursued as portrait expressionism.
If you look closely at Lucian Freud’s paintings. Nuevas perspectivas , exhibited in the rooms of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum until June 18, the viewer will be disturbed by the painter’s psychological scalpel with which he extracted the hidden pain of what he experienced, the silent wound of the present of an instant between reality and the painting, the flame of the pupils about to be extinguished. A fragility that with great difficulty his models, women and men, try to safeguard even though they already tremble, sullied and dispossessed.
The painters close to the affection of his painting, such as Francis Bacon or David Hockney, maintained that he was not demanding about the time spent in dialogue with his creatures –it was what he turned his lovers, friends, descendants into– and tried to ensure that naturalness emerged from his accommodation, sometimes slipping into a confident dream or a relaxed abstraction of the pictorial moment. That was his trap, his anesthesia. What Freud needed in his obsession to capture the hidden personal essence of each one of them, turning them into expropriated subjects of themselves before the domination of his gaze. Forceful, invasive, predatory.
In fact, neither his women in love nor his daughters nor his millionaires face his inquisitive plastic scrutiny. Only the faces of the underground performer Leig Bowery, who said “I think of myself as a canvas”, and that of Guy with his dog Speck, seem to challenge him from the same position of power, without losing composure or control of his emotions. The rest of his models look for a blind spot in his vision where they can find refuge. A place where you can completely vanish after the artist’s bite or rebuild the intimacy he has stripped you of, without having given his consent.
The violated countenance of its victims always appears helpless, watery, uncomfortable with the focus in front of which they express their disconnection, like the portrait of John Minton from 1952, defined by his eyes drowning in sadness, fleeing from the conflict that led very shortly after. in his suicide. No consolation can be appreciated in the approach of a painting that should speak in a low voice to who was a friend in the face of that crisis of representation.
Nor does she do so in Último retrato from 1976, where the woman lowers, anguished and remorseful, the weight of her eyelids, about to break the slackness of her pupils, trying to hide the scar of suffering in her dark circles. They both convey the unfathomable depth of emotions from which they seek to protect her dignity, and her desire to see the post-mortem of her anxiety finished. Deep, complex in the emotions contained under the pressure of a submissive resistance in Girl with a White Dog from 1951, where Kitty Garman tries to maintain her composure in a tense atmosphere of silence in which the sorrow of the eyes prevents contact, they empty inside of a wet mist.
That despair is present again in Hotel Room from 1954, in which Caroline Blakwood no longer shows off the complicit frontal splendor of Girl in Bed from 1952, but rather the helplessness of her inner crying, with her sidelong rejection of the cold gaze of Freud in self-portrait, his fist clenched in his pocket tense, an oblivious spectator already of a deteriorated love relationship, cracking in that instant of enormous distance between them.
Lucian Freud likes to show the traces that each model tries to keep private, like the heartbreaking torment in the eyes of Bacon 1956, or the guilt and shame that the character in Man and Woman tries to hide by lowering his eyes and gestures. of 1963, marked by the scar cut from his mouth to his ears for having ratted out the bosses of the mafia gang to which he belonged. Other times what he chooses to apprehend from his models, by recreating them in still life scenes, is the emotional distance that embitters and grips the conflict in their relationship and with his ego.
This is the case of Two Irishmen in W11 from 1981, where he insists on his desire to express that what is outside is what is inside, through the framing of the father who seeks to isolate himself in a thought that reflects deception and contained coldness, while the son simulates a false security by resting one hand on the father’s chair while hiding the other between his back and his jacket; he does not know or find shelter for the emotional orphanhood of his pupils. The tense affective discomfort is just as evident in the pretense of the painting Great interior of W11 from 1984 of his children and lovers composing suspenders in a rereading of Watteau’s Pierrot content.
This excellent exhibition makes Freud’s art explicit, his condition as a voyeur of interior collapse and lets us feel the flesh as a landscape, intimacy as a tear. So close so far.
