Talking Strait: Spaces on show

A cluster of artists in the tiniest of spaces and in the hottest of months should only spell disaster – a show has to succeed instantly, or the visitor will scupper off at barely a glance. July is the month for collectives, so how had this lethal combination manage to work for all these years? The cool halls of St James Cavalier are showing the richly-promising portfolios of the latest batch of graduates from the Art and Design Institute, while the air-conned atrium of Bank of Valletta has introduced contemporary artists into its series of retrospective monographs. Subversively, the Malta Arts Festival has opted for the small and hidden, an incidental pause on one’s walk along the shadiest of otherwise sun stroked streets of Valletta. And it works.

Definitely not an establishment-type of collective exhibition, this is one show where the government agency’s art programme has found and made space for the curator’s own creative positioning of some site-specific key works of art. The force of the pieces on display more than surpasses the lowliness of the exhibtion space and its temporary apparatus. Lisa Gwen Baldacchino has opted for the bare language of installation art, working with the starkness of an emptied residence to add resonance to the works of art presented by Sean Gabriel Ellul, Ruth Bianco, Fabrizio Ellul, Anton Grech and James Micallef Grimaud.

Ms Baldacchino has succeeded in creating an integrated narrative out of these five artists’ individual metaphors on the art of seeing: Sean Gabriel Ellul’s pictures of hallow-eyed figures gazing at the viewer, near-portraits in conversation with the viewer through the frame of museum conventions; Ruth Bianco’s veiled distortions of the boxed-in existence of prostitutes to the slow rhythm of the crowd that paces a red-light district; Fabrizio Ellul’s minimalist enlargement of two figures that occupy the picture frame uneasily; Anton Grech’s nuanced forms taking anthropomorphic shapes in the viewer’s mind, and playing games with the contradiction of the organic shapelessness of beeswax framed into a sculpture by a pinewood cuboid frame; and James Micallef Grimaud’s anarchic peep-show into the behaviours of an audience at the cinema.

The exhibits by Sean Gabriel Ellul, Mr Grech and Fabrizio Ellul would have probably sat better within a more conventional gallery setting, because of the way they tie in the contradicting tensions between viewer and viewed object, however their subject matter links up well with the Strait Street context. Ms Bianco’s installations as well as Mr Micallef Grimaud’s work more comfortably with the idiom of installation art, and the starkness of the garage-like spaces that such exhibitions find themselves in as a norm.

The MCCA have succeeded in showcasing, albeit in a minuscule form, what Malta’s artists are up to today with works that will reward any effort that a viewer will make to visit this exhibition. Sadly, there is no publication to this project. A catalogue with the curator’s words, would have underlined the show’s coherence. It would have also completed the organisational standards that befit a national art programme. This shortcoming is highlighted by the exhibition’s solitary status as the visual art offering in this year’s Arts Festival, that measures somewhat modestly when seen against the richly populated art programmes of previous years.

■ Spaces/Spazji is at No. 187, Strait Street, Valletta until July 30.