Deleuze on Painting

In keeping with the position maintained throughout his work, Deleuze's writings on painting reject an aesthetics of mimesis in favour of a celebration of effectivity. Mobilizing a dynamic of combative extraction, Deleuze shows in these writings how works of art can engage with local instances of suffering and constraint in such a way as to open these on to other, livelier possibilities. Examining Deleuze's most extended analyses of the work of particular painters (namely, Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (1981), and 'Le Froid et le chaud' (1973), on Gérard Fromanger), this article looks in detail at the workings of this mechanism in each case. Arguing that the version deployed in Deleuze's discussion of Bacon is limited in its ability to negotiate some kinds of contingent negativity, it maintains that this might, accordingly, be supplemented usefully by the differently inflected version at work in his piece on Fromanger. The article concludes by suggesting how these two versions of combative painterly extraction might most productively be imagined as working in tandem.