There is so much to do, but so little time. I find myself having to choose between so many options, and having to prioritise. I visit several museums and fine art monuments. When museum fatigue hits, you just need to sit and unwind. It is impossible for it all to grasp your attention. Or is it? I surprise myself, when a lot of it does.
Each work is a meditation on the suffering, physical and mental torture, and the tragedies that war brings with it
The same goes for my exhibition visits, and there is a lot of mental preparation and thought that goes into viewing exhibitions. And I was hesitant about the subject that Tonio Mallia chose to show to the Maltese audience in his ongoing exhibition. The subject is morbid. It is war.
Mallia is an artist who has been haunted by the subject of war, and his innate sensitivity has led him to explore its brutality and futility. This is his second war-themed exhibition.
There is a marked element of tenebrosity. Each work is a meditation on the suffering, physical and mental torture, and the tragedies that war brings with it. Cruelties witnessed, that not even animals are capable of achieving, because war is premeditated.
He depicts vast expanses of desolate landscape, animated with turbulent backgrounds, sometimes with the presence of human life, or in other instances, the remnants of it.
Children also feature, and this makes your experience that much more emotional. Poignant tales told in large paintings, sometimes coupled as diptychs, vertically or horizontally oriented.
But these diptychs do not always necessarily carry on the story being told. Rather, as in the case of Missing, the left part zooms in on what is happening in the bottom left hand corner of the other half: the ghostly figure of a distressed boy at the foot of a plane wreckage, covering his face, sobbing.
In the introductory note to the exhibition by Prof. Richard England, he speaks of the “pointlessness of war”, the pointlessness of which has been the subject of so many artists and poets.
And although the subject may seem out of context, and distant from our current reality, wars are still raging, and the brutality of man to man has not abated.
How mankind can be so crudely careless with other human life must be an endless and tormenting question, one that I heard debated on my last trip to Bavaria, where the group and I visited the concentration camp at Dachau. I am at a loss to find an answer to the question.
I was reluctant to visit an actual site where over half a million coldblooded murders took place. I was walking around, silent, light-headed, in shock.
And Mallia’s exhibition would not be an exhibition I would like to visit if in a bit of a sombre mood. I am usually of the idea that art must lift the senses, and usually take this to mean that it should represent something that is beautiful. But, I can find a lot of beauty in Mallia’s war series, such as in the composition, the execution, the depiction of landscape to complement the scene.
The technique is masterfully controlled. You would not easily be able to tell, or appreciate, that what is before you was not executed in the oil medium. In fact, everything was executed in watercolour with other mixed media on textured rice paper, stitched together in order to make them large enough and appropriate supports for Mallia’s subjects.
Not any conventional medium, you may say. But then, neither is the subject conventional. It is gratifying to see how Mallia has tackled the subject when we are more accustomed to seeing him work on landscape painting.
The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful catalogue with large loose illustrations of Mallia’s works.
WW is open until today, in the Upper Galleries of St James Cavalier, Valletta.