Yanik Haenel, writer. “The night allows all kinds of excesses”

In Bacon Blue, Yannick Haenel mobilizes all the resources of language to transform his text into a picture that displays all shades of blue, from cobalt to royal. Invited to spend a night at the Pompidou Center in Paris during the exhibition whole bacon In 2019, he recounts an enterprising adventure that takes him back to his African childhood, as well as the aphrodisiac character of literature and painting, in a body of work that joins the sensitive and the intellect, the visible and the invisible, what we think about and about. . we hear with a lot of Rimbaldian synaesthesia. Or how to pass the brutality of Francis Bacon to a strange and paradoxical gentleness…

Madame Figaro. – What do you have to do with painting? ?
Yannick Haenel. – Passionate relationship. I dedicated one book to Caravaggio, another to Adrian Jenny, and not a week goes by that I don’t go to a gallery or a museum. I can go by train to see a painting in Rouen, Strasbourg or Dijon, and I have a penchant for so-called violent paintings, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Bacon. These artists do not like human violence as such, but they like to expose it and show it in its instantaneous form. For a long time it was assumed that the painting represents an eternal mural, great ideals, gestures that endure, but these artists are elaborated by the elusive, or rather Baconian idea of ​​the moment of death, as in George Dyer’s triptych. , in front of which I stayed for more than an hour, admiring as well as enduring. Painting offers initiation, like music; it is a language without words. For me, visiting pictures are the planks of life, and painting is a constant school of subtleties.

Did you accept the offer to spend the night at the museum because it was Bacon? ?
Yes, and because it allowed me to fulfill a fantasy of being alone, finally, with a picture, or in this case, forty-two. Bypassing the hustle and bustle of exhibitions that prevents us from being truly present and open to the works. Not without difficulty, moreover, because I felt the influence which it exerts on Bacon. Tonight was a sensual adventure. I was seized with an ocular migraine, faced with an overload caused by the contemplation of his art, a little like Stendhal’s syndrome, and I chose to think of the occasion as the first application of Bacon to my body, and there again; as an initiative. you will lose your sight to see better. His picture burns the retina and my hope, only after two hours of relative blindness will I manage to make myself available. I believe there is a condensation of sensitivity that makes it difficult to be alone with the one we love and those we love. Invented device of the collection My night at the museum I was required because it gave me time to immerse myself in Bacon’s violence, whereas if I saw the exhibition on a normal afternoon, my phone would ring, I would be thinking about the next appointment; you, I would have. I told myself that I was going to write an article… There I was taken by what is hostile, diabolical, nihilistic in Bacon’s painting; otherwise.

You are more of a mystic…
I’m looking for fountains to drink from. And so I chose to see Bacon from another side, under the sign of the blue, because at certain moments of the night I was caught, because I was thirsty for it and wanted it in this spray, in this flow, in this extraordinary way. Bacon’s vitalist character, about whom we speak little, because he orchestrated his own legend, putting himself on stage dead drunk, talking about suffering and “flesh” to resume his words, about which Gilles Deleuze wrote extraordinary pages. Bacon declared that, passing by restaurants and corpses hanging from hooks, he saw himself in their place. It’s a whole tradition, from Rembrandt to Sutton, that I’m interested in, but there I had access, thanks to the liquid chaos of the night, something else… What I liked tonight, then in writing, is the possibility; going from joy to depression before opening up to the world, no longer controlling things, allowing the polarities to collide. This is what Bacon invites. we cannot remain scientifically, cynically or playfully distant from such complex art, we must be prepared to pay the price. The night allows for all kinds of distractions, until the magic of the last part…

Here we find themes from your previous book, Paying Treasurer, which appears in the Folio sacrifice, expense and sex…
I wrote it right after seeing the exhibition, actually, and more deeply, the erogenous nature of the sentences is for me the big thing that binds the passionate interest in painting; lighting the lights with words, bringing the written register to the point. making it a kind of enlightened play, almost with childish writing Cashier-payer, an idealistic hero disguised as a banker, through whom I paradoxically praise spending; Now, Bacon is someone whose ethos is to never stop striving. Physical costs, the desire for debauchery and destruction are not intermediate for him, in my opinion, but a way to stay on top of what is happening while painting, in a senseless and enlightened way. It is as if the fall was so terrible that it was necessary to necessarily restore himself to some form of drunkenness. From noon to midnight, Bacon spent his time drinking and partying with his friends in an almost sporting manner…

Painting offers initiation, like music; it is a language without words

Yannick Haenel

Why do you associate blue with erotica?
I think about the picture Wrestlers, dating from 1953, in which Bacon is disguised as having sex through a wrestling scene. One has to imagine what effect is being produced in Great Britain at the moment, especially since the figure below, with a grimace of enjoyment on his face, is instantly recognisable; It’s Bacon. He offers himself to make love in front of the art world and his country. This painting offered to Lucian Freud captivates me, because I do not perceive it as a provocation at all, but an invitation to enter the pleasure palace. It also shows a line of the lover’s back, from above, an absolutely gorgeous, icy blue-white. With this ridge painted like a mountain top, at the junction of the two bodies, something both explosive and modest emerges: a royal blue. It’s no small thing for a showman like this to choose the impossibility of sex with great violence… but also with great subtlety. With this text, I humbly invite you to see the blue under the corpses. With animals, with people, with everything that decays, there is a form of sorrow and pity in bacon.