Not pretty, but expressive art

Unfortunately, I do not always get the opportunity to attend art exhibitions, but I was delighted I made the effort and went along to the opening of Ray Pitrè`s retrospective at the Bank of Valletta head office in Sliema on Friday evening.

I cannot give the show the full credit it deserves until I get another viewing. Opening night is not the ideal time to really appreciate any exhibition, more so a retrospective.

One needs space and concentration to fully appreciate painting and sculpture. However, I can vouch that this exhibition is above the ordinary and is well worth a visit. It is invigorating because the paintings are bursting with energy, colour and emotion.

Pinching a quote from an advert of a famous Danish beer - it reaches the parts other (beers) works of art cannot reach. Some of the work is not what one would want to wake up to every morning but art is not decorative, it is about life, and life is not always pretty.

For example, one of my favourites is Cremated, an experimental piece Pitrè worked on in the mid-Sixties. Darkened fibreglass hangs from a hook in an otherwise empty white frame. It might be an abstract work but it conveys much more than many a figurative piece.

The fibreglass features again in Escaped of 1997. Incredibly expressive, I could not describe it in words, I am therefore reproducing a photo from the excellent book on the retrospective.

In complete contrast I was struck by Mother, also painted in the mid-Sixties. I have no idea whether the painting looks anything like Pitrè`s mother, but as a work of art I found it delightful.

Not everyone`s idea of a portrait, but I loved the colours, the lines and atmospheric sense the work conveys. As I intimated at the start, this is only a `sound-bite` of the full potency of the exhibition.

I suppose it is the eclectic quality of this show which makes it so exciting. It is great to see institutions like BoV giving us much-needed high-calibre culture events. Besides, I got a proper drink and some really good bites. Prosit tassew!

Not getting served

Hold the line please. That irritating chant, which thankfully I have not heard for a while, was brought back to me by a hapless resident in St Paul`s Bay complaining in The Times that not only has his water supply been cut off, but he cannot even get any response from the company`s customer care as to when his water is likely to be running again.

What compounds the frustration of being waterless is not knowing what is going on, how long the situation will last and what alternative, if any, is available.

The reason I have picked on this is because I know that if long water cuts are occurring, at some point I am going to be hit.

Not having lived here at the time when it was commonplace to be without water (don`t worry, I suffered in other ways - remember the winter of discontent in the UK?), I still have nightmares at the thought of being without water for longer than 24 hours.

Now I know that I am not the only person affected by such inconveniences, but what has pushed me to include this item is the complacency of Maltese consumers, sometimes even when it directly affects them.

Surely the man who wrote to complain was not the only one inconvenienced by the lack of customer care. Somehow we Maltese are surprisingly tolerant. We can take a lot of ineptitude, inconvenience and incredibly bad service.

You might get the occasional letter in the press and sometimes, as with the bird massacres and the anti-petard campaign, you might get a barrage of complaints in the media; there was also a spate of complaints not so long ago on the archaic gas delivery service.

But we soon settle down to accepting that things cannot get better, whichever party is in government.

We use our vote not because we believe we shall see change, but because we think that using the vote as a threat might have some effect.

We always blame the politicians, and then we elect yet another set of politicians hoping a new broom will sweep clean. We should have learnt that lesson.

But we get the politicians we deserve. It is up to each and everyone of us to start sweeping and stop accepting "m`hemmx x`taghmel" (there`s nothing to do about it). If enough of us complain and make enough noise, politicians will have to listen.

They are a pretty tough-skinned lot who will only take notice if the pressure is kept up. Otherwise, they will only have the party hacks to tell them what `the people` are not happy about.

Important news

My office is full of newspaper cuttings I keep for future reference. Since filing is not a job I particularly like or have time for, the cuttings tend to submerge and emerge as the papers shift.

Yesterday a little slip with an important item emerged from underneath one of my stacks. At the beginning of this month, for the first time in this country, a man was jailed for physical and emotional wife abuse.

Maybe Magistrate Jacqueline Padovani Grima watches Eastenders and was influenced by what women in violent relationships go through, or maybe she has seen enough real cases to appreciate that men need to be given a clear message that their wives are not there to be abused.

We need more women like Magistrate Padovani Grima on the Bench.

Common sense parking

Every morning, as I drive through the Gzira backstreets on my way to work, I wonder whether traffic wardens patrol this area at all. Besides the bread van - whose driver delivers door to door - stopping in the middle of the road, blocking the flow, there are delivery vans on every single corner at every junction parked in a creative assortment to ensure you cannot see whether traffic is approaching either from your left or your right.

I wish something is done about it, at least from Monday to Friday. I could put up with it on Saturdays since getting across each street safely is the only challenge I get on that day.

But it does bug me that common sense does not seem to feature in our traffic and parking problems. I would have thought that a large lorry parked halfway across a road for example is more likely to cause an accident than a car parked next to a kerb which cars do not turn at - no-entry streets for example.

Speaking of which, I hear local councils have received some kind of notice telling them to allow parking at kerbs which do not block or restrict access, visibility and manoeuvrability.

I could not resist including this picture which is doing the e-mail rounds. I assume you can park a motorbike legally in the gap. Or you can try parking your car on its side.