War is beyond hell in paintings by Britain's Chapman brothers

By LLOYD JONES

London's Saatchi Gallery is the perfect venue for a retrospective of the Chapman brothers. Every pocket and room is booby-trapped with a surprise. Starting at the foyer. If you are particularly slow and as guileless as I am, then you will fall for the plump tourist couple, complete with bulging bellies, cameras, pink sweat pants and technicoloured shirts gazing up at the names of past chairmen of the London County Council.

You may think they are almost like an installation. Then upon learning they are an installation by Diane Hanson you will think they could almost be real. Similarly with the filthy sleeping bag lying in a corner. One of London's homeless has found a cultured haven. You may do as I did and alert a doorman. Amused, he will point out what he has pointed out countless times before, that the sleeping bag is a sculptural piece.

In fact, it is bronze. But it looks so cloth-like. So material-like, surely he is mistaken. Before you can reach with a finger to test Gavin Turk's bronze another guard is on her way to stop you.

By now, enough has been written on the enterprising Saatchi Gallery. What brought me here was a comment about the Chapman brothers in the London Sunday Times by Waldemar Januszczak: "Their masterpiece, one of the truly great achievements of British art through the ages, let alone now, is called Hell."

Dinos and Jake Chapman are part of the younger, emerging group of British artists. More has been heard of their contemporary, Damien Hirst, whose formaldehyde shark enjoys pride of place at the Saatchi Gallery.

Dinos and Jake attended the Royal College of Art together, worked as assistants to Gilbert and George, and in 1992 announced their intention to work together with what is described as their "anti-aesthetic manifesto".

Hell is approached through an elegant wood-lined corridor. In a large room there are nine glass cabinets, each with its own apocalyptic flavour. Much of what is displayed can be bought at modelling shops - the figures, miniature trees and landscape effects. All of it ordinary.

It's what they are up to that is spectacular. The information available points to 5000 cast figures, all hand-painted for their journey into Hell.

Viewed in no particular order, this is what the Chapman brothers' idea of Hell looks like. Classic ruins are draped in Nazi insignia. Bow and arrow figures are thrown into pitched battle with armed soldiers wearing uniforms and Nazi arm bands. If not for the bow and arrow figures the scene could be from World War II or it could be from any war - depravity and atrocity are general hallmarks, and skeletons are skeletons wherever they are found.

In this cabinet they are bloodied and shackled together in a pile. Soldiers mount the hill on which the ruins stand. Some forest covers the hill, and only the trees remain relatively untouched, almost verdant.

The first response to these glass cabinets of mayhem is to step closer and press your nose to the glass. You want to see more. So you creep closer, seeking out bits of cameo horror - two skeletons impaled on a long staff. Interesting.

What else? A rapist gnawing on a bloodied human limb enters a woman from behind. Shocking. Okay. What else? Heads are impaled; dozens of dazed heads. One headless body with a gaping and bloody neck wound sits with its decapitated head cradled in its lap. A two-headed man pulls the entrails from a victim who appears to be alive. Who appears ... well, we're back to the illusory effect that greets you at the doors of the Saatchi Gallery.

Still, it is so life-like, so recognisably real. And how could that be, you find yourself thinking, since you have never been to war. And yet, you tell yourself, yes, all this is plausible.

Moving around the cabinet, almost in shadow, you come upon more impaled heads. An eagle sits atop one staff, and on closer inspection ... is it? Yes, it is ... it is pecking the brains from a decapitated head. As before, the trees are verdant.

Some of the figures are half skeleton/half body. One such creature has another pinned to his back. Around to the lee of the battle hill, where a low valley is filled with body parts, skeletal remains.

A sly-looking skeleton fits neatly into a rock crevice; its clean intactness suggests a deserter. Moving around to the foreground of battle, we see a blackened figure on horseback, a four-legged woman, more decapitated heads. And that's just the first cabinet.

I was thinking that will do you lot at home. But then in the next cabinet I come upon a scene of such depravity it would make Quentin Tarantino cringe. A man hangs upside down from scaffolding, his legs are roped apart, for a skeleton and a three-figured body on the other end to work a huge bush saw into the poor victim's groin. That particular scene, as it happens, is a rehashed variation of an actual scene famously drawn by another great chronicler of vile deeds, Francesco de Goya y Lucientes. His unflinching eye has found its match in the Chapman brothers.

Goya drew hangings. In the Chapman brothers' Hell there are many hangings; but there are also executions, cannibalistic acts, suicides - pylon wire is requisitioned for such purposes as figures attached to wire nooses leap from bridges.

Once you are aware of the reference to Goya, the Spanish master's subject matter is to be found everywhere. Goya's torrid picture of a huge human figure rising from a blackened landscape of carnage (The Colossus) is updated by the Chapmans to a thick leaden colour of explosive cloud pouring from a volcano. It has blown its top. Or it has had its top blown. Something like the effect of a nuclear cloud presses against the glass top. Bloodied, half-naked men scramble down the sides of the hill.

Hell is also a burial ground, and in one cabinet bodies pile 20 deep. Pink bodies coagulating and turning into hydra forms. And still, as if some concession to hope and blossoming eternity, the trees remain verdant.

Another cabinet features a concentration camp in all its ghastly familiar particulars; the coils of wire, executions, and a grotesque chimney that emits a thick, congealed smoke. Barely alive skeletons mountain the stairs. Four Nazi soldiers keep a rooftop watch. Soldiers are half-naked, upper bodies covered in neat uniforms, but genitalia are exposed. In a discreet corner one man fellates another. A chaplain moves among the skulls administering to souls. So that was Hell.

We move along a long elegant corridor. The formal Tudor portraits on the walls provide a feeling of cool civilising relief. But then we enter the end room to more visceral mayhem. Contemporary looking life-sized manikins are tied to a dead bough; one manikin has had its genitals cut out; a pair of arms are tied up like meat at a butcher shop. A tousled head with a brown moustache balances at the end of the bough. Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994) is a sculptural interpretation of one of Goya's etchings which the Chapmans have re-made in plastic.

Goya's Disasters of War series grew from the guerrilla war waged by the Spanish against their French occupiers from 1808 to 1814. His drawings are more reportorial in style. Charles Baudelaire once wrote of Goya: "[His] chief merit lies in his ability to create credible monstrosities".

The Chapman brothers' Disasters of War series of 83 hand-coloured etchings is more phantasmagoric in style. By way of example I will take just one. A railway line departs a woman's vulva. A truck with "GOYA" on its side is about to plummet into a ravine. Now you notice its load in the form of a huge missile called "INTERCONTINENTAL PENIS". The missile also provides scaffolding for a dangling figure in a blue smock, an American flag sticking out from his pink penis. He is passing blood. The blood splatters on to a bedrock of skulls.

Many of the Chapmans' mannequins sprout penises from their faces. The old argument - he has a dick for a brain - has been reproduced writ large here. In one work, a sweet-looking toddler has a penis for a nose. Is it a birth defect? Or as the caption would have it? ... "a horrible prick with a shameless tell-tale nose" ... In fact, we are still on the Goya trail.

The same devilry can be found in a preparatory sketch Goya did for his painting The Family of Charles IV. Here, Goya's sweet-faced boy holds a magpie by string while a cat waits in the shadows with a gleam in its eye.

But back to Hell for a final observation. There's the matter of all those genetic oddities, bodies two and three-fold joined at the hip as it were. There is a fibreglass model of a two-headed woman. And where the cheeks press together the female genitalia is reproduced rather convincingly.

In the cabinets of Hell there are women with three heads; one woman with three bodies. Genetic defect run awry? Or is it the Chapmans having fun? Fun, I suspect. Though I did read an interview where the Chapmans launch manifesto-style into a denunciation of "singularity as a superstition left over from monotheism".

That would explain Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-subliminated libidinal model (1995), an orgy of pre-teen genital-less bodies melted into a single hermaphrodite. The only genitalia are facial penises instead of noses which sprout from the girls' faces.

The Sunday Times piece by Januszczak ended rather tepidly with the conclusion that the Chapmans are essentially anarchic. You could just as well argue they are traditional, and what Goya's contemporary, the French writer Theophile Gautier, had to say about his Disasters of War would apply equally to the Chapmans.

"There are heaps of dead bodies that get stripped, women that get raped, prisoners that get shot, convents that get robbed, populations that flee ... patriots that get strangled ... But what a fine precision, what a profound knowledge of anatomy in all the groups ... " Et, encore.

* Lloyd Jones travelled to Britain with Cathay Pacific.