Critical Essay
Philosopher, writer, and cultural critic Crispin Sartwell wrote the following essay for Tom Powers: Dante in Philadelphia, an exhibition of large-scale prints inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. His text places the work within both the long history of Dante imagery and the contemporary experience that shaped the project.
Rings of Powers By Crispin Sartwell
Written on the occasion of the exhibition Tom Powers – Dante in Philadelphia
The Garden Loom (our building at Brown and North Second that once housed a lingerie manufacturer) was delighted to host Tom Powers’s ambitious and accomplished series of large prints based on Dante’s Inferno. Each work embodies an interpretation of one of the thirty-four cantos of the epic poem.
The remarkable process that brings these images into the world is physically demanding and deeply embodied. Powers sought to create images that would have the impact of painting while requiring a monumental scale. The process engages the artist’s entire body in the act of printmaking, depicts bodies in states of action and repose, and ultimately draws in the viewer’s own physical presence. The powerful use of circles throughout the compositions can evoke a sensation of falling into hell—or climbing out of it.
These “rings of Powers,” of course, correspond to Dante’s famous circles of hell. They place the viewer alongside Dante Alighieri and his guide Virgil as they traverse the underworld. As we move through a room filled with Powers’s images, we may find ourselves assuming Dante’s role, with Powers serving as our poetic guide. He shows us a path into hell, and perhaps, in time, a path back out again.
Powers has connected the origins of this cycle to the isolation experienced during the COVID pandemic. If that period represented a descent through the circles of hell, it was a more solitary and psychological journey than Dante’s own. In Powers’s striking treatment of Canto XVI, for example, Virgil dominates the upper left of the composition, seemingly fishing for monsters. Whether these creatures are real or psychological remains unclear. Like many of the monsters of contemporary life, they appear to exist simultaneously in the external world and within the mind.
Among the great literary works of Western culture, Dante’s Inferno is perhaps the most visual and one of the most frequently illustrated. Powers joins a distinguished lineage of artists who have interpreted Dante’s vision, including Sandro Botticelli, William Blake, Eugène Delacroix, and, perhaps closest in spirit to Powers’s maximalist sensibility, Robert Rauschenberg.
For visual artists, the Inferno naturally suggests maps, diagrams, layered structures, bodies in ecstasy or destruction, and a raw expressive energy. Yet each generation brings its own imagination and concerns to Dante’s text. Each must develop its own understanding of hell—and, more importantly, of the world it inhabits.
Each generation needs a guide.
This is ours.
— Crispin Sartwell
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