Who knew hell could be so entertaining? Masked sunbathers lounge by a swimming pool, behind an extravagant baroque diving board, while pink-striped pastries the size of skyscrapers wobble on gilded platters near an enormous lobster.

Shoppers crowd around a massive lipstick statue, which stands beneath a sweeping stairway topped with a massive crystal perfume bottle. There are scenes of opulent luxury everywhere you look. It's like if Harrods had erected a flagship store in Dubai, with Donald Trump overseeing the design.

When artist Pablo Bronstein was imprisoned, this is what happened. With only a dip-pen, watercolours, and large sheets of paper to work with, he was able to release the most extravagant depths of his ornament-obsessed imagination.

He adds, standing in Sir John Soane's Museum in London, surrounded by his lavish depictions of hell, 22 large-scale paintings crawling with feverish detail, "I sort of lost the plot." “Without the normal routine of fairs and shows, I was working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “After two years of navel-gazing, you start to lose your boundaries.”

The result is the acclaimed British-Argentinian artist's most personal and intense collection of work to date, a self-portrait of someone who is both attracted and repulsed by the themes of his drawings. The upshot is an indigestible buffet of bling, with Frankenstein-styled architectural concoctions sampling everything from beaux-arts and baroque to art deco, Bavarian rococo, and Viennese secessionism.

You can't decide whether to slobber or run a mile as this film is brilliantly hellish, wondrously horrific, and grotesquely wonderful. You want to vomit, but it's difficult to quit eating.

Bronstein adds, "Sometimes I'm very seduced by visual tropes, but disgusted by their content." “How do you depict something that you know is morally questionable, corrupt, or evil but still has extraordinary beauty?”

Some of his answers can be found in Hell in its Heyday, an exhibition that depicts Satan's kingdom as a showcase metropolis studded with garish monuments worthy of the most distasteful dictator, in the style of late 19th-century commercial posters. The first room presents a world of supercharged consumption, with mirrored casinos, magnificent department stores, and fantasy holiday resorts, taking a characteristically sardonic attitude on the last two centuries of industrial and economic advancement.

The robber-baron world of coalmines, slave-powered container ships, and gilded oil wells that have made it all possible is depicted in the second room, which pulls back the brocade curtains to reveal the tools of production. It's a frenzy of unfettered adornment, with opulent swags heaped upon inflated scrollwork, an enameled, gilded, bedazzled orgy of excess.

The Soane Museum is an appropriate setting. Its rooms are brimming with antiquities, and its walls are covered in similarly gigantic paintings of architectural visions that inspire both amazement and terror.

Bronstein was particularly inspired by the work of Joseph Gandy, a partner of Soane's, whose visions of Pandemonium, based on John Milton's poem Paradise Lost, seethe with a similar level of anguished excess. Some visitors have even inquired as to whether Bronstein's sketches are authentic, as if Gandy had taken acid and gone crazy with the paintbrush.

Bronstein confesses, "The strong colors sort of happened by accident." “One of the red skies had a problem, and in attempting to fix it, I made it even redder. I secretly felt emancipated, and went back to the previous drawings to strengthen the colors.” His most lively work has come as a result of the joyful accident.

In one scene, a roundabout is crowned by an enameled cement statue of Atlas in Hades, holding aloft the earth's dome above a grotto of dancing muses, balanced on a circle of serpentine porphyry columns swagged with a rococo caprice railing. This wedding cake of a traffic island stands in front of a colossal casino tower, ornamented with a fountain of Venus lactating water, immersed in her shell beneath athletes holding globe lights, and striped with silver and gold mirrored glass. In the background, an infernal blood red sky flames.

Elevated roadways supported by ornamental piers weave between an enormous central bank and a temple-like administrative building crowned with a statue of Lucifer in another picture of the city center. The bank's portico is supported by grotesquely vegetal columns, indicating the origins of classical orders from plants, "much like the central bank is as intrinsic to hell as the trunk of a tree," according to a caption.

The entire landscape is suffused in a sickly yellow hue.

The faded splendor of Buenos Aires, where Bronstein's family hails from, is referenced throughout, and things get more personal in the description of hell's floral gardens. Argentine flag ribbons dangle from a dainty gazebo that frames a three-headed pink swan fountain with garlands of flowers dangling between their golden beaks.

With his customary wry smirk, Bronstein says, "It's the closest I've come to a self-portrait." Tropical glasshouses, seized from Kew Gardens, adorn the scene, as the massive dome of Nazi architect Albert Speer's unbuilt Volkshalle looms in the background.

It turns out that the artist is present - represented as a defenseless baby being pushed through the bleak countryside in a pram.

In a room downstairs, we're taken even deeper into Bronstein's intimate world, with a 30-minute film made primarily inside his home during the lockdown. A monstrously veiled estate agent/antique dealer gives us a tour of an elite "creativity-led apartment," her shiny nails suggestively fondling the furnishings as she praises the "indoor landscaping by the trendiest of seating curators."

Bronstein's performance work incorporates commedia dell'arte characters, Japanese kabuki-style makeup, and drag, with the artist himself delivering a camp voiceover to the bizarre fever dream. I dashed back to the drawings, where I wallowing in their poisonous embrace.

The terrifying pictures are the ideal image for our new roaring twenties, oozing with imperial pleasure and environmental ruin. It's a post-pandemic, post-Brexit apocalyptic image of a boomtown that's as flimsy and corrupt as it is achingly desirable.

Thanks to Oliver Wainwright at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.