What unites Bacon and Giacometti is the battle in defense of figuration and the consequent refusal to give in to the spread of abstract art. Both aspire to remain in the wake of tradition by pursuing, outside the currents and beyond definitions, their own very high and original declination of an exasperated realism, projected to the extreme limits of representation. In this sense, like no other artist of the twentieth century, they have been able to guarantee entire generations the possibility of an art centered on the human image which, by merging appearance and reality, has been able to represent the desperate and convulsive sense of life in a contemporary key. . For Bacon as for Giacometti, who only met in the early XNUMXs, when both had already fully developed the character of their research, art represents first of all the recovery of man and his centrality. It constitutes an obsession with life, a torment of the flesh and of the spirit. It obeys the need to transfer the ghosts of a fragile and desperate existence onto canvas or plaster. The subjects of their works are defeated individuals, alienated from loneliness. Desperate presences that cry out the precariousness of man, similar to creatures consumed by their own life. They take on profound meanings that go beyond the rules of representation to express in all its brutality a sense of devastating and dramatic helplessness. The force with which Bacon and Giacometti create their images fuses reality and vision in an image freed from any rigid obligation of verisimilitude. The exhibition, set up thematically, brings together the works of the two artists, underlining their peculiarities and above all the elements that unite them. A fundamental role in their research is given, for example, by the representation of figures in space: Giacometti in the three-dimensionality of the sculptures, Bacon in the two-dimensionality of the paintings. The artist from Graubünden often relies on a series of frames that “cage” the subject as in the famous Le nez (1947/49) a head hanging in a metal structure, which has become an icon of his work. Bacon responds by placing his characters in a prominent position, on elements not always clearly defined, similar in their function to a pedestal, to a throne which, prospectively, projects them towards the observer. This concept also includes the frequent use of a carefully elaborated spatial device, in the form of glass cases, geometric scaffolding or cages designed to force the subjects into structures without any direct relationship with the surrounding space to accentuate the posture twisted and convulsive of the imprisoned bodies, to maximize their strength and visibility. An extraordinary example of this approach is Head VI (1949), belonging to the famous series of paintings inspired by the Irish painter from the vision of the Portrait of Innocent X, by Velázquez. Similarities are also found among Bacon's great triptychs, in which the desire to go beyond the limits of the canvas is evident through the search for dynamism and the rendering of movement and some single compositions in large size by Giacometti. In Three Studies of Figures on bed (1972), Bacon resorts to the stylistic motif of spinning arrows aimed at underlining the convulsion of movement imparted to the three clinging and curled figures. Giacometti overcomes the static nature inherent in sculpture by giving us one of the most emblematic works of his production: that Homme qui marche (1960), a central and absolute intuition of the human condition. The exhibition ends, in a crescendo of emotions, in a context in which the intensity, passion and aggressiveness inherent in the work of both artists are highlighted. The deep wounds inflicted by Giacometti with the gouge to model the Buste d'homme (1965) testify to the sculptor's impetuous approach towards the model and reality. A desire to penetrate the form also present in Bacon's works: in Lying Figure (1969) bodies and faces seem to have been broken down and deformed with merciless, lucid ferocity. And Bacon himself, making Giacometti's words his own, affirms that “the greatest adventure is to see something unknown born on the same face every day”. Both artists have constantly pursued new formal solutions, they have transmitted to us absolutely new figures compared to the usual visual experience of the world, emerging from that dark world of uncontrolled emotions in which the anguish of each of us dwell. They have been able to interpret the convulsive existential dimension of our time, placing man, with his weaknesses and his fascinating complexity, at the centre of their investigation, portraying him in the truest and most disenchanted way.