Head VI 1949, Francis Bacon © The Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS 2008. Courtesy of the Tate.

A jaw is spread out in a silent scream, a human jaw, wide open to let the body escape. The flesh is contracted and dilated in a spasmodic movement. Your reflection emerges from the glass that covers Head VI in the first room of the Tate Britain’s Francis Bacon exhibit.

When Bacon started painting in 1931, conceptual art and abstraction were rising against figurative art. He used traditional techniques and refused to belong to the avant-garde movement. At first, he didn’t have much success. Bacon kept repeating that in painting, he felt lonely, he had no interlocutor.

Yet his position was not a blindness to modernity–he didn’t pretend history didn’t happen. On the contrary, history has a very important place in his art but he synthesizes it, integrates it into his work. The influence of painters such as Cezanne, Picasso, Rembrandt is obvious, but Bacon refers to them with the aim of creating something different, something new. In the 1950’s, Bacon painted several variants of Velasquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (which are on display in Room 2 of the exhibit) and worked on traditional subjects, such as the crucifixions (Room 4) or mythologies (Room 9).

His work seeks to touch the nervous system and not the brain, the sensibility and not the intellect. That is why Bacon always isolates his figures in a circle, a chair, a throne, a bed, a cage, so no story can come between them and the figure can become a “matter of fact”.

Despite the distortions, his portraits remain faithful to their models (Room 7). Bacon represents man first and foremost like a living creature, complete with its animal dimension. Men are flesh, blood and bones–they are a piece of meat before being a person. A Francis Bacon painting is almost a phenomenological experience, as he seeks to capture the very essence of the human being and not only its representation.

Francis Bacon, until 4 January 2009. Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG.