Magnificently presented, particularly in its ambiance and curation by curator Lola Durán Ucar, "it all began with a man lost in a dark wood".
It is Dante Alighieri, the poet who composed the Divine Comedy in the early years of the 14th century, in an Italy divided at the time by deep political strife.
"Dante experienced those conflicts closely — says the curator —, he actively participated in the political life of Florence and ended up condemned to exile, far from a city to which he could never return. That turbulent world enters his poem."
Hell is the first of the three parts comprising the universal poem of the Divine Comedy, alongside Purgatory and Paradise.
As virtually everyone who has completed secondary education or its equivalent anywhere in the world knows, Dante becomes the protagonist of his own story. And to find the way back, he must descend into the realm of the damned, accompanied by the Latin poet Virgil. The journey traverses nine circles: the first is Limbo.
They are followed in succession by those of lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. As they descend, the degree of severity increases. Lovers, heroes, politicians, figures from Antiquity appear there, but also contemporary men and women of Dante himself. Each encounter reveals a guilt and a punishment, but also a life, a choice, and a story. Dante will only be able to begin the path out once he has reached the deepest depth of hell.
This story is arguably the one with the largest and most powerful presence in the history of Literature. Those nine circles, populated by sin, the damned, and unsettling landscapes, have inspired artists from all countries for centuries.
Two of them, Gustave Doré in the 19th century, and Robert Rauschenberg in the 20th, have plunged into the same poem, and now the Fundación Canal has brought together for the first time the two complete series that both artists, a century apart, dedicated to Hell. A total of 111 pieces, a number that in itself could be the subject of multiple cabalistic interpretations.
Visitors to the exhibition can thus contemplate the Frenchman's dramatic, monumental vision imbued with medievalist aesthetics, whilst American painter and artist Robert Rauschenberg offers a fragmentary and obviously more contemporary gaze, turning Hell into a reflection on the society of his time, the 20th century. To achieve this, he introduces images sourced from political newspapers and magazines, featuring athletes, astronauts, or scenes of everyday life, transferring them to paper and combining them with drawing, graphics, watercolour, gouache, crayon, or ink.
Lola Durán emphasises that, unlike Doré, Rauschenberg does not construct a unitary scene; instead, he brings together on each sheet images, gestures, and fragments that relate to one another, compelling the gaze to recognise them. Doré turns the narrative into scenes; Rauschenberg rereads it through the images of his time, and thus through a radically contemporary language.
With this exhibition, the Fundación Canal offers an opportunity to journey through those nine circles of Dante's Hell and discover how a work conceived over seven centuries ago can continue to challenge us and acquire new meanings.