Shahin Afrassiabi

Soy Capitán present Francis, a large-scale immersive installation by Shahin Afrassiabi bringing together more than seventy paintings and sculptures developed from a single photograph of Francis Bacon in his studio. Rather than a portrait series, the exhibition unfolds as variations on a theme: a sustained exploration of how one image can generate an open field of painterly possibilities.

Installed without hierarchy or focal centre, the exhibition forms a dense constellation of faces, fragments, and "earthscapes" that continuously echo and transform one another. Bacon becomes less a subject than a vehicle – a figure through which painting tests its own limits, oscillating between humour, absurdity, and tragedy.

"At some point Bacon the artist becomes everyman … a vehicle of infinite permutations of expression.”

—Shahin Afrassiabi

Shahin Afrassiabi (b. 1963, Tehran) holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College and lives and works in Spain and London.