Customer Reviews

Barlowe's Inferno

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Bottom line: if you like jarring images for your jaded visual palate or as Robert Williams put it, are a "retinal fiend", then buy this and buy it now! But beware, it is not the usual eye candy. You have to like your candy made of habanero peppers, gravel and meat by-products.

There is very much that is odd about this book. It's certainly a coffee table book but only a deranged, militant bishop would leave it out on the coffee table. It is not a guide, neither field nor travel, nor is it a photo-journal of a trip as, with only 22 full color paintings and 6 sketches, it would be a woefully incomplete one. Yet, at times, one is left with the feeling that Barlowe is on the verge of a new form of story telling, i.e., using a series of almost disconnected images to force the reader thru a series of emotions and conclusions leading to an inescabable denouement.

The artwork, while visually stunning, has its oddities also. It owes nothing to Dore, Bruegel or Bosch and in this Barlowe succeeds in the almost impossible task of creating something "completely new" in his re-fitting of Hell. His handling, always meticulous, has become a vituoso display of textures and gone, generally and thankfully, are the sharp linear highlights and brushwork of his earlier works.

The images presented are neither hermetic nor hieratic and very approachable in symbolic content. While somewhat more impressionist than realist, the paintings range from landscapes to portraits. Yet, they are curiously without sympathy--the artist is moved to awe by the atmosphere of Hell but conveys little pity for its inhabitants.

In this, he matches Dante, but oddly again, gone is the divine logic of Dante's punishments. Barlowe's punishments are capricious and illogical. In fact, there seems to be a glaring logical flaw (something like the Daggerwrists in Expedition: how can the population be stable if the parent has to die in the birthing?). Unlike in Dante (and Niven and Pournelle's derivative re-telling) souls can be utterly, permanently torn apart or altered (morphed) until they are either laying about the landscape or are part of it. It seems like they can become so diffuse one wonders how there is anything left to suffer pain.

Finally, in the most inventive part of the book lays its most dissatisfying aspect. Barlowe begins to outline a logical ecology for Hell that uses souls as raw material, yet never completes it.

Depicting an artist's descent in to hell, Barlowe's Inferno is a richly stunning masterpiece. This hell is not a simple pit of torment, not limited to one religions preconcieved notions, and definitely not a place you would want to be. Everything about it screams of human suffering as the souls of the damned are cruely ground down in to the very stuff hell is made of. One of the other reviewers mentions that the depictions lack sympathy for the souls of the damned, but indeed how can you have sympathy for the souls able to wonder when every brick of the behemoth structures surrounding them is itself a soul, when the very dirt is constructed of souls so old and torn they have become agonized fragments of dust. From the Demons Major and Minor with their regal stances and manor bearing witness to their once grace filled state, to the lesser demons completely alien and yet frighteningly recognizable, to the bricks that stare at you with their sorrowful imprisoned eyes, this book is simply captivating.

Very highly recommended... but be certain all your lights are on when you open this beautiful but disturbing book.

Although Barlowe's searing INFERNO imagery is rendered in a somewhat less photographic, more "painterly" style than his earlier books I have, it's dead-on target for depicting this eternally skin-crawling, hyper-grotesque netherworld. Helpfully described by a sort of narrative text, the twisted inhabitants of Barlowe's raging nightmarescapes purposefully go about their unending torments with skull-shredding focus: their horrors make bizarre sense.

I first went through this visually and spiritually cacophonous, masterful work on Christmas day. What contrast: listening to carols about angels from Heaven, while staring at demon-shrieking souls in Hell.

Final note; don't miss the deliciously caustic JUSTITIA OMNIBUS at the bottom of page 2.

Having read Dante's Inferno, a visual description is hard to render. Mr. Barlowe has done just that. He has painted the hard to desribe. One look through this book and you will be "disturbed." Mr. Barlowe has taken the ideas of different religions and beliefs in rendering his "Inferno." Having caught a "glimpse" of what awaits those that do wrong in the afterlife, one sees the visual deterent to doing wrong. This book is a must see.

Barlowe seems to have drawn his visions of hell directly from some deep, primordial ancient memory within us. His illustrations are haunting beyond measure, and seem to resonate with a subconcious picture of what many of us must think the hell of religion and legend must be like. His illustration style departs from his work on Expedition and his other earlier work. His style in Inferno has an ephemeral quality, leaving the distinct impression that there is still something just beyond the edge of perception, beyond the ink on the page. The text makes a perfect accompaniment, providing palpable texture to this world of Barlowe's. As dark as the subject matter is, this is a beautiful book and should definitely be in your libary.

This collection is basically Barlowe's visual interpretation of Dante's Inferno from The Divine Comedy. Each painting has a page of description pointing out the purpose and reason for every detail in the image. From a tortorous picture of Lillith, to the haunting painting of a minor demon riding on the backs of several tortoured souls held together with muck, they are each fascinating to examine. Like Dali and other fantastical artists, one can look at these paintings and see something new every time. The color work is fantastic, and in some paintings actually appears to be digital photography until one looks closer. A ver well-thought-out project, it is pleasing to see another side of Barlowe's intelligent work.

Normally I am reserved in my reviews but this one stands out as an entity that deserves high praise. I had been researching visions of Hell for some years when this book came out. It was an exquisite find as the author's vision was finely detailed and provided a wealth of information. His Hell is different yet similar to Dore's vision which appealed to me. It is as if he took Dore's vision and placed his own ideas and concepts on top of Gustave's.

This is highly recommended. The pictures are stunning and the text adds some nice thought as well. One reviewer wrote that he thought the souls looked to much like statuary and while I do agree with that criticism it is a minor quibble and is not always the case.

I almost feel bad saying that this is anything less than perfect. To be sure, the paintings are very moody, well executed, and distinctive. Barlowe fans will want this in their collection for no better reason than that this is a very good example of his talent. However, given the subject matter, I was somewhat disappointed.

One of the major problems is that the demons and, especially, the damned tend to look more like statuary than entities proper. This can work for the demons, since they are otherworldly beings, but for the damned, the effect is that we aren't looking at people in torment, but merely strange sculptures. The expressions, in particular, are often abstracted (e.g., the one where a number of demons are dissecting a human) and often don't convey either torment or dispair. His tendancy to use a lot of blues for the damned contributes to this unfortunate effect (ironically, the sketches in the back do a much better job than many of the paintings).

The demons do come off much better, but many of them are more weird than frightful. Some do stand out, such as the Australopithecine demon, and one of the lesser demons whose clothes are made from human flesh (it is interesting that Barlowe nearly discarded the latter from the work for failing to fit in with his overall theme). Many, however, are simply too abstract in morphology to really disturb.

The architecture, however, is grand. His notion that the buildings of hell are built from the bodies of the damned is a brilliant idea, and the form of the architecture (which he terms archiorganic) do, indeed, seem to belong in a literal Hell.

Overall, I think that Expedition remains a better example of Barlowe working around a theme. When I read the text that accompanies the illustrations, I sense what he was aiming for (which is something worthwhile), but the paintings just don't quite live up to the descriptors. Even so, he is a very good artist and his vision of Hell, even if not as terrifying as I would have hoped, remains a unique and largely interesting one.

Wayne Barlowe has long been one of my favorite artists, up there with Bekinski and Giger. He has a real talent for pulling the viewer into his world, so that we can almost smell the sulfur. This and its companion piece Brushfire are my (current) favorite art volumes, as I seem to be in a very hellish phase right now. But even when I'm not feeling hellish, I'm in awe of Mr. Barlowe's talent. I love the texture of the worlds and characters, the deep, roaring, ash-filled atmosphere of the environs of hell he portrays. I am always inspired by his work.

Being a fan of Mr.Barlowe's fantastic work in the past, especially his 1990 book "Expedition : the A.D. 2358 Voyage to Darwin IV", I believe this one is a stunner! He has broken his own mold by departing the worlds of dinosaurs and science fiction by entering the dark realms of horror. His narrative and artwork were so effective that I felt I was there beside him, to the point of being nauseated and frightened by the images he evoked within my psyche. I recommend it highly, although it's best read when all the lights are turned on inside the house.