Lot 6: Painter painting, Painted (after Francis Bacon)

ANNIE CABIGTING (b. The Philippines 1971)
Painter painting, Painted (after Francis Bacon)
oil on canvas
66 1/8 x 51 5/8 in. (168 x 131 cm.)

The present work is part of the most recent series of Annie Cabigting's Something to do with Art which is a solo exhibition at Finale Art Gallery in July 2007, Manila. The series replicates smashed, scissored, split artworks and restores them into contemporary attention, healing their rifts and fragments through subtle, thematically-charged insight into how ordinary things approach the meaningfulness of art.

In her rendition of a Francis Bacon self-portrait, the artist maintains the jagged blankness where Bacon had cut out his face as a seeming gesture of personal revolt, delivering neither revelation nor criticism, at peace with Bacon's matter-of-fact self-loathing. It's a statement spiked with irony, of how, by replicating the artwork, the artist exorcises its novelty and inevitably, its shocking appeal.

Acting as an arbiter between John Baldessari and Maurice Doherty, two conflicting artists with diametrically opposed artworks, Cabigting juxtaposes their images in perfect symmetry, dissolving their points of tension. What have been perceived as a counter-attack of each other now occupies the same neutral space, mirroring their essential sameness.

Not one to make grand pronouncements and belabored gestures, Cabigting quietly settles in the gulf that seems to divide artworks from its audience and artworks from each other, charging it with the ever-renewing power of imagination. In the process, she disrupts the skin of the usual and tilts the frame with which we view art, offering us an unhinged world constantly burnished by compelling wit and deceptively ordinary wisdom. (source:http://www.finaleartfile.com/show07_art.html)

This is a series of work is undoubtedly inspired by Francis Bacon who is the celebrated Irish figurative and is best known for his bold, austere, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery.