The curling up figure of a young woman grabs the leg of a middle-aged man that, standing between mirror and easel, is painting ”the painter is surprised by a naked admirer”, which is the last painting of the exhibition, one of the last painted by Lucian Freud. He portraits himself on a different scale respect to the woman’s dimensions, using an uncommon distance: “it is a new stage of his art. Lucian is now 83, he has gained a different distance from things, as to make tangible all the time that has passed” – Bill Feaver talks about him with tenderness and extreme attention, he knows him very well, as he belongs to a small group of people which usually go to the painter’s house in Notthing Hill and he is curator of this colossal monographic show dedicated to Freud, fifty years after his first exhibition in Venice. Over ninety works, many of which are exhibited for the first time (seventyfive paintings and sixteen etchings) coming from American and European collections, included the famous portrait of the Queen of England, exceptionally borrowed from dalla cancellerie.....
All Freud’s pictorial path is dominated by portrait. As he once said: “Everything is autobiographical. And everything is portrait”.
Feaver ensures he’s got s an unfailing smell for those he’s going to portrait. Like a sleuth, Freud follows, chases, forces his preys to endless sessions, sometimes standing, mostly lying on the back in compliant positions. He works in two studies placed at half a mile’distance one from the other and submits himself to exhausting sessions, day and night, with scarce breaks just to eat: “when I have finished a painting, I have a strange unsatisfaction feeling...”.
His figures are the ruthless transposition of raw, true bodies. Sitting on a chair or lying on a bed, they don’t wait nor represent something. The scenery is a layer which doesn’t divide the flesh from the environment in which it is sinking. Naked flesh standing for itself. Everlasting talks between who exposes himself to the portrait and the painter: “Lucian says he doesn’t want to paint people without an inner life of their own”. What catches the eye most are certain almost unnoticed physical contacts between two bodies lying on the same bed which scarcely holds them. Allusions to a sort of interior, creatural, maybe original pietas. Unarmed, exposed bodies, compliant in their obscenity. Many figures lie dividing narrow spaces with a dog. The presence of a dog is a constant “Lucian gave me two “whipped”. They are peculiar dogs, with a delicate, thick skin. They are really loving dogs, they sleep with you, it is possible to create a bond with them; moreover, they are easy to paint, since they sleep a lot”.
The portraits exhibited are myriads. Subjects alternate and repeat during the years, they are crossed without indulging on one in particular, and appear as they must be, in their intimate necessity. br> On the same wall coexist the face of a seemingly not too intensely thinking boy, the friend David Hockney and the Queen of England, equally depicted. Lots of close-ups, isolated figures on backgrounds of pure painting. And then interior cuts, where the figure is alienated in estranging angles: a slant bed, a chair, human figures submerge the parquet’s wood, sections of windows.
Enormous naked bodies like sloughs of flesh with prominent veins, arterious streams, epidermic abscesses, breathing collarbones put forward, untuous and thin hair. Flabby pink flesh, with that particular Anglo-Saxon solidity which easily flushes by its whiteness and lack of sun, almost asphyxiated. Bones are only a spatial structure, full flesh predominates. We can easily take what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze observed in the figures of Francis Bacon:”the body shows itself only when the bones’ support fail, when the flesh ceases to cover the bones, when flesh and bones exist the one for the other but independently, the bones like body’s material structure and the flesh like bodily material of the figure”
(F.Bacon, “Logic of sensation”, Quodlibet 1996)
When Freud gives a title to his selfportraits, he almost always puts the voice “reflection”. In one of the most recent he is seventy, naked and halfsized, wears boots without strings and he is standing in front of a mirror, in self-perception; you can see the vibrant, livid mark of his first works. His etching of 1996, “Reflected self-portrait”, has a dark hue, whilst in 2002 we see a painter “of flesh and ashes” in front of a cleaning clothes’ wall, dressed in grey with a silken scarf wrapped around his neck. Once he said that “I do not mean to retire from active life. I want to portrait myself until the day I die”.