Tartarus
'Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain'
Malborough Fine Art, London
16 March – 22 April 2023
‘Poi s’asose nel foco che gli affina.’ – Dante, Purgatorio XXVI
Take first of all the petrified, silently screaming terror in Bacon’s visceral visions. The ominous fleshy masses rise and twist and turn, shuffling off the mortal coil, against the flat sanguine vacuum of a background-- a curve here, an angle here, something like an amputated limb,something like a neck, the semblance of a mouth, with unmistakable teeth gnashing cannibalistically. Take this first, and imagine it made tangible, then you see how the sculpture could be described as the physical realization of Bacon’s hellscape.
Truly the exhibition is starkly infernal. Complementing Bacon are the distorted metallic figures of the likes of Elizabeth Frink, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick (members of the generation whose tortured style Herbert Read infamously branded ‘the geometry of fear’), like samples from hell, presented on their pedestals like prisoners in the austere, white, bare Tartarus of the gallery.
Butler’s ‘Study for Third Watcher’, with its tensed, outstretched neck and bare clavicles, and arms clamped to sides, face turned completely skyward, could be Tantalus, the martyr of desire, ever yearning, never reaching.
No music now from the female Marysas, arms tied above the non-extant head by invisible fetters, there is not even screaming from the torment of being flayed, the textured bronze giving the painful impression of degloved flesh (and of course we remember that bronze must be fired and burnished’). Is that Prometheus, protean sculptor, bound in coarse, flaking metal? IsArmitage’s ‘Seated Woman with Square Head’ an idol of Eris, goddess of strife? Are the many inert and static the Giacomettian angsty souls of Asphodel?
Out of what vale of tears are these bodied forth? Most directly, the wreckage of the Second World War. But of course, regardless, there is always human capacity for belligerence and cruelty. This is what we get for our hubris; this is also our salvation. This is what has been salvaged, these are the fragments shored against our ruin. This is what we must confront if we are to survive the fire that refines us, il foco che ci affina.
