flesh, a kind of phantom with eczema-covered hands and feet”,9 as well as those dedicated to Rembrandt, who “portrayed himself like a dehydrating fruit”, as Alonso would say. Dante, Van Gogh and Alonso would finally meet up in a work from 2004. Alonso would once again, thirty-five years later (with another half-life lived, in Dante’s terms) be inspired by this Hell. After all, a poet (or a painter) is, as Borges said, every one of the men who inhabits his world of fiction, in each breath and every detail. Alonso would obsessively persist in working with Dante’s visage. The soul who looks on with implacable, mordant severity. His search would be to freeze that resigned pain, that immortal sadness.
glimpse into this singular, enigmatically traced labyrinth of a landscape, whose curious cavities seem to evoke other precipices and other cornices that man must edge up to look out over, where, like in the circles of hell, quagmires are nested into pits in extremes of ferocity and gloom. And that wise, tender, benevolent Dante, young and old, who passes through valleys of pain, will also be the painter himself, who later accompanies Van Gogh, another “traveler”, to whom Alonso had already raised a monument to in his ink drawing Monumento, from 1967. Likewise, his series of portraits of Dante bears some relationship with the series dedicated to Enea Spilimbergo, to whom he turned his attention once he had become “an example of punished, painful
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Only ten percent of the illustrations interpret the cantos of Paradise. Cf. Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis, Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950. In the Milan exhibition catalog in 1971, Mario de Micheli writes, “Dante’s Hell gathers the modern horror of the concentration camps, the massacres perpetrated in the parallels of war and hunger, and mass civilization’s thousands of alienations all together in its pages”. Galería Rioboo, 1963. Ceán Bermúdez was an art historian, critic and friend of Goya’s who presented the series of prints in the Diario de Madrid, on the 6th of February, 1799. Rauschenberg worked on the Divine Comedy between 1958 and 1960. He used collage and photographs from magazines such as Time and Newsweek transferred onto Hallucination paper and combined with drawing and watercolor. Alonso would also employ images from the graphic media in order to redirect viewers’ gaze to the hells of the 20th Century. Conversation with the author, 2006. For the occasion, a labyrinth was constructed that visitors had to navigate, winding up in a musical space without no images except that of Dante ascending into Heaven, where Vittorio Gassman’s voice could be heard, reciting the poem. Alonso set up five installations that reflected instances of knots in different zones of the labyrinth invoked by the circles of Hell. It opened at the same time as the short film directed by Claudio David, titled Divina Comedia, based on the illustrations. Part of the show traveled to Italy in 1971, presented in the Giulia gallery in Rome and in the Eidos gallery in Milan. One hundred drawings were exhibited, with the patronage of the Argentinean Consulate. Interview with Tomás Eloy Martínez. “Carlos Alonso: la soledad del artista; Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Spilimbergo y otras obsesiones”, Buenos Aires: La Opinión; La Opinión Cultural, 27 October 1974, p. 1-4.
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