by Dags & Dante
Divine Comedy
Thirty years of repainting Dante's Divine Comedy as a chronicle of contemporary civilisation. An existential account in large-format painting.
“Divine Comedy is not a story about the Middle Ages. It is a visual language for understanding the civilisation in which we live.”
— Dags Vidulejs, “A Visual Sociology of the Twenty-First Century”
Why Divine Comedy?
“We cannot fully understand our own century while living inside it. Art allows us to step outside history and observe the invisible structures that shape human civilisation.”
I read Dante as reportage. He describes the century I am standing in.
My figures are types. They stand for the patterns societies keep repeating: power, fear, cooperation, conscience, dissolving into rhythm.
Inferno is coercion. Purgatory is the civic life we actually live in, where responsibility is still possible. Paradise is what we still have.
Thirty canvases, three metres each. A chronicle of the century we are living inside, told through Dante's poem.
Three cantiche, after Dante
Inferno
The descent: society, power and conflict at their rawest.
Enter Inferno · 6 works →
Purgatory
The in-between: transformation, doubt and the weight of choice.
Enter Purgatory · 8 works →
Paradise
The ascent: hope, love and the light that thaws what was frozen.
Enter Paradise · 9 works →The Process
The Artist's Studio
Sketches, studies, works on paper and the charcoal drawings made while the Divine Comedy cycle took shape.
Enter the Studio →If this project spoke to you
Jūrmala City Art Museum · Rietumu Bank Exhibition Hall · Māksla XO · Zunda Towers · Art Hong Kong · ART Vilnius · ART Moscow · Tel Aviv Performing Art Center · ART Helsinki · Kutaisi · Frankfurt · Bruges · MC2 Galleria