At the show with the artist: Benjamin Orlow visits Botticelli’s Divine Comedy
“Fear as creativity” is the title that Bejamin Orlow, a talented 31-year-old Finnish artist based in London, gave to the writing we publish here below as his kind contribution to CFA’ section devoted to contemporary artistic readings of the art from the past epochs. Orlow’s detailed piece of artistic literature is focused on the group of illustrations that Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli drew between 1481 and 1495 to visualize a pivotal poem written almost two hundred years before, the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Thirty of these rarely exhibited drawings are currently on show at the Courtauld Gallery in London, on loan from the Staatliche Museen in Berlin. Orlow, who is currently working on a opera-dance-video set in the Finnish army, went to visit the exhibition last week and then put his own sensitivity at work. Below is the artist response to Botticelli’s exquisite drawings and Dante’s ethical oriented journey into the Catholic afterlife.
Inferno XXXIII. The ninth circle and third ring of Hell, where Virgil and Dante walk among countless naked bodies inside the clear ice of a frozen sea. This image reminds me of a picture I secretly would look at in my granddad’s photo album from the Second World War as a kid, where some soldiers, one possibly my granddad, are standing in a field completely covered in stripped dead bodies spread out over the ground. Underneath the picture my granddad has written “funeral” in cursive. The picture is only about 5 x 3 cm wide and I would take a magnifying glass and carefully examine every detail of it and other pictures of burning buildings and charred corpses. The spreads of the album would alternate between scenes like that and pictures of my grandparents sunbathing on the beach.
In a detail of the etching Virgil and Dante stop at one of the bodies, Ugolino della Gherardesca, who in life starved to death as a prisoner together with his children and is now eternally gnawing away at the head of his tormentor Archbishop Ruggieri.
They also encounter Frate Albergio even though he is still alive – it is explained that sometimes the soul is separated from the body and condemned even before death while the body becomes inhabited by a demon on earth.
Inferno XXXIV. In the centre of Hell, where Satan is depicted as an enormous three headed monster with bony bat-like wings that have half open eyes on the webbing. His back has three wings on the right side and just one, drawn in un-inked steel point, that looks like a pencil trace, on the left. His two massive hands are scooping bodies into each of his three faces. His furry chest is drawn the same way as Botticelli draws fires, and his body is left without a torso making him anatomically similar to a cherubic angel head. The unfinished composition makes it have more of an impact than the fully drawn version, in which Satan becomes more of a big action figure. In this one he seems like something that has appeared psychographically on the paper. Dante and Virgil arrive here crossing a frozen sea and Dante first thinks he is seeing a gigantic building in the mist, but slowly, while getting closer, he realises it is Lucifer.
Since I first read Marquis de Sade’s 120 days of Sodom about ten years ago I’ve kept returning to it from time to time. The first time I read it I felt personally attacked by de Sade, and angry at him for causing me the pain and nausea and introducing ideas that gave my imagination an expansion into areas I did not want it to grow. I would read it in parts until I felt too disgusted to continue, but I would eventually always return until I had finished it. Throughout the book I experienced an escalation of intensity which kept outdoing itself and finding ways of being more depraved than anything I was prepared for. Most intense was the last section, which is in part unfinished, where de Sade had written outlines, notes and even reprimands to himself on what would be inflicted on who and when. Like the drawing, the work being mid-creation makes it less confined to being just a standard product of its author and expands it into something uncontained.
Purgatorio X. The first terrace of Purgatory, into which Virgil and Dante emerge from cracks in the floor and explore God’s personal art collection. They see a gigantic framed image of an army bursting through a castle gate amid combat, the characters life sized. In front of the painting on the floor are two men crawling with huge boulders on their backs, but they are not payed any attention. On the left side of the enormous canvas is another one, unfinished, with sketches of a palatial courtyard and celebrating musicians. Bulls are pulling a chariot that hasn’t been drawn and there is a body in agony beneath it.
It reminds me of a Henry Darger composition. The characters are collaged into the image in a way that makes them connected and isolated at the same time. The events in the mise en abyme are as real and active as the characters observing it. The settings and objects appear to be sentient. And there is an unexplained and unattended presence of people suffering in macabre and imaginative ways.
Inferno XIX. In the eight circle of Hell they cross a bridge that has collapsed. Beneath it are circular holes with legs sticking out, the soles of their feet on fire. Virgil gives Dante a piggyback ride down so they can inspect the torment closer. Some holes are empty and above them are lamenting people pulling their hair.
Later, in another drawing taking place in the same circle, Virgil and Dante cross stone arch bridges over empty riverbeds filled with people who have lost limbs, parts of their heads, their faces.
Inferno XXII. In the eight circle of Hell a group of demons armed with long spears with several spikes march by Virgil and Dante. One demon looks straight through the fourth wall and grimaces. In front of them is a swamp with with people up to their waists in water being hacked and stirred around by demons flying over them. One person has crawled ashore and is explaining something in panic while being assaulted. One of the demos appears to be a normal man just wearing a demon suit. Above it all, on a ridge, a line of people whose heads are twisted in the opposite direction of their bodies walk by.
Inferno XVII. The seventh circle of hell in which Virgil embraces Dante while they ride a flying scorpion with lion paws and a human face, while hairless people, some wearing collars, sit in agony. Most are on fire.
The creature Virgil and Dante ride is Geyron, who Hercules killed by shooting an arrow into his forehead splitting his skull like poppy petals. In life, Geyron had three giant human shaped bodies, on one pair of legs. Chimera type hybrid anatomies and maximising body parts to attribute superpowers make me think of Lu Yangs Wrathfull King Kong Core. The work lists and describes all the extremities and accessories of the multi armed, legged and headed Buddhist god of wrath, and combines this with an animated neurological mapping of the brain. I feel that her work emanates a very strong intuitive logic and a capability to breathe life into obscure characters and aesthetics that I would normally see as merely foreign and distant. I connect her work to The Big Head Scientist because of a similarity in intensity and pace. The Big Head Scientist is a kind of Henry Darger of Youtube, who’s animated videos merge NOI ideology with alternative etymology, ancient history, science fiction, pop culture and contemporary politics. Usually he/she presents a member of an alien race who explains in what way they have infiltrated and effected humanity throughout history and what their moral codexes and values are.
Paradiso II. Dante is now in the first planetary sphere, heaven of the Moon, accompanied by his Wertherian love Beatrice. Since Virgil is a heathen he is not allowed access to heaven and has to return to limbo. Beatrice and Dante stand in a perfect circle looking out at a map of the solar system, in which earth is the centre. The planets are all aligned in their orbits and the Sun is five rings away from Earth. On the outermost ring, the Premium Mobile, six tiny figures appear to be dancing. The further into paradise they move, the more abstract and cartographic their surroundings become and Beatrice’s levitation increasingly elevated. Dante only met her twice in life, once as a child and once in a square 9 years later. She only briefly said hello to him but it made him rush home because he was so overwhelmed by her. When he fell asleep he dreamt she was sleeping and being carried by a large being, and when she awoke she ate his heart which was on fire.
November 21, 2022
