Bacon produced highly personal portraits, eliminating all individual physical features and emphasising the unique destiny of each man. The body, as flesh, is the essential element in his portraits, and always holds a double meaning of representation and alienation. The British painter turns his human figures inside out, showing their organs and deforming their faces by means of a distortion that erases their features. With a personal, instinctively created iconography, he sought, in his own words, “to trap a moment of life in its full violence, its full beauty, ” and managed to convey the most sordid and frightening aspects of the human being, and therefore in this respect his painting might be considered a somewhat convulsive interpretation of European existentialism. The deformations of the flesh to which Bacon subjects his figures are also related to the violence of Picasso’s most dislocated figures painted in the mid-twentieth century.