Bacon and cyst

9 - Bacon and cyst

A feeling of vertigo. Of unease. Or beauty. “Unsettling  strangeness”, says Freud, “is associated with things long known and ever familiar”.

A tormented self-portrait of the inner Francis Bacon.

And here seemingly spinning upon itself, in colours red and blue, a 3-dimensional representation of a cyst, that of a parasite, Pneumocystis jirovecii. This fungus, that we all of us host, is the principle cause of opportunistic infections for persons with weakened immune systems living with AIDS.

Violence of human torment as revealed by art. Violence of life as revealed by science.

A disturbing and tragic strangeness always ready to rise up from the familiar. Metamorphosis... Of which the poet Nelly Sachs said: “Instead of a homeland I hold the metamorphosis of the world.”