The title bears an unsettling echo of the Taliban’s “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” the body indirectly connected to the attack on the World Trade Center. Yet the phrase itself surfaced months earlier, encountered by the artist at the Bethnal Green Toy Museum. That the work was installed and exhibited in London on 11 September 2001 gave it an unavoidable and troubling resonance.
At first glance, The Abhorrence of Virtue and the Love of Vice appears as a vortex, a circular field of churning greys in which fish, crustaceans, and human faces are dragged into dissolution. Step closer and the spiral resolves into something older and more disturbing: the open mouth of a bearded god from antiquity, expelling a torrent of poisoned water.
The composition recalls a classical tondo, but instead of balance or harmony, it stages collapse. Diseased forms, amphibian and human, circulate within a closed system that feels at once mythological and entirely contemporary. Pollution here is not only environmental, but moral. A universe in which corruption becomes the dominant force, and virtue itself is pulled into the current.
The surface is restrained and largely monochrome, almost clinical, yet never still. Flecks of pink and orange rupture the greys, suggesting infection, chemical growth, or open wounds. The painting holds the viewer between attraction and revulsion, drawn in by symmetry only to recoil from what it contains.
Like Bosch’s infernal scenes or Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante, the work imagines damnation not as distant allegory but as lived condition. The great circle becomes a trap. Within it, all things, natural, human, divine, are contaminated, recirculated, and undone.
And yet the painting resists closure. The god’s face remains, half-submerged but still present. The spiral does not complete its collapse. It continues to turn. In that unresolved motion lies the work’s force: a reminder that corruption is not an end state, but a process, one already in motion, and one we inhabit.
Exhibited:
The Abhorrence of Virtue and the Love of Vice, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, September London 2001
