Smoked Bacon Series

The Smoked Bacon Series is a series of painted boxes for all the cigarettes that visual artist Francis Bacon smoked during his lifetime.

Smoking kills and everyone knows it, yet people continue to buy cigarettes regardless of the risk of addiction. There is still something romantic about the activity of smoking. The graphic of the packaging is very attractive, despite the obligatory warning and accompanying picture that is supposed to deter the potential smoker. Quite intuitively, the link between this warning picture and the works of Francis Bacon occurred to me. Bacon emphasised the gravity and cruelty of his existence with his human figures twisted into beasts. However, his horrific ideas are expressed in a very aesthetic way in his paintings.
In this series, I am working on this contradiction. Everyone recognises the graphic of the cigarette packet. By over-aestheticising this, the packet acts as extremely seductive. Filtering the warning text on the packets creates titles that only indicate the vitality of a body or a human life. By painting, the disgustingness of the warning message decays.
I multiply the dimensions of the packets by a factor of 8.3 as an allusion to the age Bacon reached despite smoking a lot. This scale allows the boxes to be used as storage for cigarettes. The structure of the box on which the painting is made starts from one measure: the length of a cigarette is the length of the 4 diagonals within the large square. Making a box that has to work structurally and prevent warping of the cardboard is as important a part for me as the pictorial work. The box allows one to think metrically, but the unit of measurement also makes this space poetic. It offers a rational counterweight to the first linen boxes by Raoul De Keyser, who saw the space between the linen as a purely poetic space.

The painting of the box (packaging) arises from the idea of the Decorated Shed by Aldo Rossi, in which, as a postmodernist architect, he wanted to give meaning to a generic modernist industrial building in Las Vegas by focusing on the façade. Here, the empty box is given meaning by painting its shell. The absurd function of the box thus becomes visible in its façade, which may or may not be perceived as attractive.