A viscerally distorted likeness of the French writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, rendered in Bacon's characteristic style of smeared, convulsive brushwork that simultaneously constructs and dissolves the human face. The figure emerges from a flat, compressed background, the features twisted and destabilized as though caught between presence and erasure. True to Bacon's obsessive portraiture of those closest to him, the painting transforms intimate familiarity into an unsettling psychological excavation.