VENICE.- The exhibition ‘FBACON7’ shows 7 works on paper by Francis Bacon. It concerns 6 colored and a monochromatic drawing of the Italian collection.

As experts know and have widely recognized, Francis Bacon produced no small number of drawings, given the sheer volume of sheaves that have emerged, little by little, following his death. The issue has also been definitively rendered official by the presence of a great deal of drawings in the London Tate collection, as well as in the Hugh Lane Gallery collection in Dublin.

Another thing that has been widely recognized is that among all the drawings that have surfaced, the Italian drawings are unquestionably the most complete, the closest to his art, the closest to his paintings.

The urban legend that Bacon did not make any drawings, did not do sketches, but rather went right to the canvas with large brushes soaked with color and let instinct and chance events guide his hand, making his painting entirely unpredictable and fascinating – a legend that Bacon himself helped establish and spread – lasted as long as it could. Everyone knows that things in contemporary art are inevitably bound to the ever irregular humanity of the artists and those who live by their sides, just as it has always been...

Today we can only revel in the joy of looking at these drawings and feeling the same rush that we experience when facing one of Bacon’s paintings, though in fact it is different thanks to a more intimate, private, secrete dimension that only a drawing on paper, something that has almost slipped out of the hand, can give. Because a drawing is different than a painting. Bacon knew this…

On paper, a surface that cannot withstand impetuosity the way a canvas can beneath a paintbrush, the violence is reined in, like that on the body of a lover when one stops before pleasure can turn into pain. The marks almost carve into the paper, sometimes caressing it, running quickly in that circularity that is one of the distinctive traits of Bacon’s way of composing images…