Abstract photography inspired by the sea

Untitled works by Jean Pierre Gatt.

An abstract photographic exhibition, Coastal Fragments is a project that was born in 2010 when two individual artists, Jean Pierre Gatt and Derek Nice, researched, in visual detail, aspects of the man-made impact along the sea edge around the Maltese islands and the UK.

Both artists inspired each other by visiting each other’s territories, with one using a photographic camera while the other brushes and canvas. Photowalks alongside both the coast of the Maltese islands and the shore of East Anglia in the UK contributed to this selection of works.

The exhibition is based on photographic images which look much closer, in visual detail, at objects found on the sea edge and its surroundings. Lines, shapes, colour and form are some of the attributes forming the base of this exhibition. The individual images are not meant to match, enhance and/or distract from any of the other images; instead, each and every one of them has its own symmetrical, linear and colourful attributes that make them stand alone.

Every little detail included in the frame is important for the creation and presentation of the whole image

The images include details of boats, decaying paint, rusted boat parts, fragments from boat houses, shadows on painted walls, stripped wood etc. Very little has been cropped, changed or photoshopped in any of these images.

They are framed on location, while walking around looking for the perfect lines to intersect or to produce a perspec-tive, with the decayed paint producing a great pattern, the rusted piece of metal still holding on to the worn out wood, and so on, so forth.

Although these details are highly visible when looking for them, they are lost when looking from a distance. However, as soon as you move closer, much closer than what is considered normal, you start to eliminate what contaminates or distracts the image, leaving in frame only the parts that ultimately give shape and life to these amazing details.

The colours of these images are also amazing in their own right; in particular, the type of paint used by the owners of these marine crafts including the choice of colour, give an in-finite palette of bright, summery and contrasting colours to work with.

There is no shallow depth of field in any of these images to differentiate between the foreground and the background.In fact, there is no foreground and background at all. Every little detail included in the frame is important for the creation and presentation of the whole image.

Coastal Fragments is showing at Palazzo de Piro, Mdina.