Triptych 1983 by Francis Bacon offers three snapshots of the same existential condition caught from different angles — figures placed within a field of deep orange that burns behind them like a stage lit from within, each panel a separate chamber of isolation that refuses to connect into narrative.

Bacon was explicit about what the triptych format gave him. "They are the things I like doing most," he said. "I think this may be related to the thought I have sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of the images captured on three different canvases." The triptych was not a narrative device but a cinematic one — three frames from a film that has no beginning or end, the viewer moving between them as between exposures, each one complete and each one incomplete without the others.

The orange ground is the first thing that registers — saturated, hot, entirely artificial. It removes any possibility of natural setting and turns each panel into something closer to a stage flat than a background. Against it, the figures emerge with the quality of specimens under examination: a distorted seated form in the left panel, limbs exaggerated beyond anatomy, the shadow stretching beneath it like a second more honest version of the body; a biomorphic phantom in the centre moving toward a black rectangular void, the figure dissolving as it approaches the darkness; and in the right panel a male figure on a one-legged chair, turned outward, more present than the others but still enclosed within Bacon's characteristic framing geometry.

By 1983 Bacon was in his mid-seventies, and the figures of his late work had shed the biographical weight of the Dyer years — no identifiable subjects, no explicit narratives of loss — becoming something more stripped back and elemental. These are not portraits of individuals but investigations into the condition of being embodied: present, enclosed, each figure moving through a space that offers no exit and no explanation. The orange ground that surrounds them provides no comfort. It simply exposes, which in Bacon's world was always the most unsparing thing a background could do.

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