Painting forces

‘Painting forces’ is an expression I have obviously adapted from Gilles Deleuze's commentary on the work of Francis Bacon. ‘In art,’ wrote Deleuze, ‘and in painting as in music, it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.’ That is very true, especially when applied to these ancient images. They are inextricably tied to a world teeming with energies, signs of which they seek to record, the better to negotiate the effects of those forces. Picasso said the same thing the first time he saw ‘Negro art’ at the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadero in Paris. He felt that those masks were not like ordinary sculpture, but were

When looking at San paintings, it is important to go beyond the reflexive reaction of linking every image to a clearly identified content, much less assigning it a strict identity and intangible meaning. Otherwise, we dull their vivid splendour, which resides in the invention of pictorial devices able to produce visual energy and impart action to it. Take, by way of comparison, a canvas by Jackson Pollock or Sam Francis, representatives of the ‘action painting’ movement: it will contain blotches and lines of colour dripped from the brush, creating dense tangles and networks. Everything on the canvas is motionless. But if we really know how to look – straight into the eyes of what looks back at us from their paintings – we also see flows and overflows, dapples and directions; we see movements – an entire life story of movement – and we follow the dance of the painters’ gestures.