Provenance:
Artesan Gallery, Singapore
Private Collection, Singapore
Christie's, Asian Contemporary Art (Day Sale),
Hong Kong, 25 May 2014

Exhibited:
Artesan Gallery, Annie Cabigting: Mutating Truths,
Singapore, April 15 - 30, 2010

ABOUT THE WORK

The renowned contemporary artist Annie Cabigting often approaches her practice by employing metacontextual references surrounding art history, aesthetics, and the art world at large. Her works seemingly transcend and go beyond the common musings of art, such as beauty, representation, and form, and focuses her attention on the complex structure that artists and the art industry exist in. Whether through photo realistic depictions of individuals viewing important and famous works of art, or her much more conceptual and rigorously experimental pieces, Cabigting makes it apparent that artworks do not exist in a vacuum, but are part of an interrelated web that ties together the various historical, social, cultural, and psychological facets that make art possible. In this 2010 acrylic on canvas work, Cabigting focuses the limelight on one of the world’s most influential artists of the 20th Century, Francis Bacon. The Irish-born British painter was largely known for his raw and sometimes unsettling figurative works that explored and unearthed the psychological and existential realities of the human condition. His subject matter is diverse, ranging from portraits of friends and acquaintances to popes, important figures, and mythological creatures. Though Bacon’s works can often come off as disconcerting, the artist’s approach was seen as liberating, especially when viewed in relation to the romantic and impressionistic styles that dominated the art world prior to Bacon’s generation. This “brutality of fact” approach to his works is also attributed to the largely personal and biographical relationship of Bacon with his works. Though one cannot reduce Bacon’s artistry to the purely psychological, some critics and scholars have attributed Bacon’s less than ideal life, which includes a history of abuse at the hands of his father, bankruptcy, petty theft, and discrimination for his sexual orientation, as a motivating force for his artistic approach. But the mental and emotional aspects of Bacon’s practice can be found beyond his actual pieces, but in the very process itself. During her own research, Cabigting discovered that Bacon had the tendency to destroy, deface, and discard his works and drafts that were not up to his standards. Though other scholars have seemingly ignored this fact, Cabigting has seemingly breathed new life into Bacon’s often forgotten pieces, effectively adding to Bacon’s already rich practice, as well as the ongoing debate on the role of an artist’s psychological, emotional, and personal dimensions in the creation of meaning. In Destroyed Painting (After Francis Bacon), Cabigting recreates a defaced painting of Bacon as a way of approaching and investigating the role of discarded vestiges of one’s practice as integral to the artistic process. The work features a seemingly unfinished portrait, wherein instead of a head and face, a rectangular shape is found at the center of the canvas. The inclusion of the geometric shape can be seen as a reference to either the works of Cabigting’s mentor Roberto Chabet, specifically his Window series, or the fact that Bacon himself held a disdain for abstract art itself, effectively adding towards the psychological and personal aspect of the piece. The art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston noted that “[Bacon is] quite simply the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling of painters … His images short-circuit our appreciative processes. They arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul.” In turn, Cabigting’s work is seemingly not only an exploration of the affecting power of Bacon’s work, but an investigation into the very soul of Bacon himself. (J.D.)