Bringing together 27 photographs by Antoine d'Agata and 25 graphic works by Francis Bacon, this bilingual French-English publication, presented as a double book, draws an artistic parallel between Antoine d'Agata's contemporary photography and Francis Bacon's expressionist painting. The two books, bound together, can be consulted side by side, creating a face-to-face encounter between the two artists' works.
 
The texts appear in separate booklets so that readers can read them while following the visual narrative.
 
"This would result in a free zone in which the body would be a range of intensity, action and tension. The photographer and artist chose the darkness of enclosed chambers as a way of accessing this simultaneously creative and destructive matrix of energy."
 
Léa Bismuth
 
Antoine d'Agata is a photographer who lives on the edge. He immerses himself in his personal worlds until he exhausts them. With the help of time, he transforms reality and shows us facts, events, mingled textures or diffuse colours that shape human forms as they disappear. In some of Francis Bacon's works we can see these photographs by d'Agata: the same worlds filled with light and shade, constant rises and descents towards hell, and that attempt to prolong a moment of joy or solitude.
 
Does the deformation of bodies, caused by the trembling of the images, go as far as their familiar dehumanisation by the painter?
 
Antoine d'Agata would probably not refuse to affirm it. Is it not precisely animality that he insistently claims for the sexual relations he photographs? The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is said to have spoken of "becoming animal", of becoming a dog, to be more precise. As an integral part of his practice, the man and the work struggle to exist. A chromatic struggle that inevitably recalls Francis Bacon's colours, whose deformed flesh is also present, as though torn apart and evaporating.
 
Following a book devoted to correspondences between the portraits of photographers Nan Goldin and Julia Margaret Cameron, with historian and collector Marwan T. Assaf, in this second volume The Eyes Publishing proposes an encounter between the works of Antoine d'Agata and Francis Bacon, with the participation of author Perrine Le Querrec, art critic Léa Bismuth and gallerist Bruno Sabatier.
 
"The first exhibition by a painter that I visited was a Bacon retrospective at MoMA in 1989. It was a shock from which I have still not recovered."
 
Antoine d'Agata