Antoni Tàpies

Antoni Tàpies was part of a small group of Catalan artists and writers who founded the literary and artistic review Dau el Set (Seven-Faced Dice) in 1948. Created within the arid cultural climate of post-Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, Dau el Set was the nucleus of Spanish Surrealism, reshaping the vanguard Surrealist current, which had been truncated during the war. Their language and texts were Catalan, which was prohibited at the time. The principal contributors to the review, the painters Antoni Tàpies and Modest Cuixart and the poet and dramatist Joan Brossa (who had given the group its name) evoked the occult images of dream, magic and ancient myth as an expression of inner freedom, both as an escape from and in defiance of the existing suppresive reality. Theirs was a liberated world of the mind, of the imagination and of inner vision.

L'Infern presents a dramatic image of hell, populated by nude  figures moving in all directions, signs of desperation readable in their facial expressions and movements. They are surrounded by an undefined, metaphysical space filled with infernal flames and mystical creatures. The dramatic tone of the painting is highlighted by the contrast of bright red and purple tones of the fire, and the cooler green hue of the bodies.

Fig. 1, Hieronymus Bosch, Visions of the Hereafter: Hell (one of four panels), circa 1490, oil on panel, Palazzo Ducale, Venice