Ruby, one of the instruments made by Matyou Galea.Ruby, one of the instruments made by Matyou Galea.

Art has become such a loaded term that some artists, the people who make art, find themselves uncomfortable describing themselves as such. Aaron Bezzina, a third-year degree student at Mcast, is one of them.

He has just walked into a busy Valletta café with a black sculpture of a head he will be exhibiting in XIV. Working mainly in sculptures, he chooses – wary of sounding “pompous”– to call himself an ‘artist’ not to tie himself to one particular medium.

“The idea of labelling annoys me. If you say ‘I’m a sculptor’, you’re cutting off any other medium which an idea can be developed in,” Bezzina says.

Matyou Galea, Bezzina’s friend and colleague agrees. “The idea is that you don’t want to become a slave to one medium,” Galea says. As for Galea, he toys with two options as to what to call himself if not ‘artist’.

“I don’t like that definition. I feel I’m still a student – even when I finish my University studies – I will be a student of life, and of art,” Galea says.

Instead, Galea, who is currently studying for his Masters in Fine Arts, would rather call himself an “alchemist”, a term which admittedly would suit the 27-year-old, with his long hair and beard.

“I like to think of myself as more of an alchemist, because it’s between science, the spiritual and the metaphysical,” Galea says. “I never think of the final product myself, it’s the last thing on my mind, but alchemy is the closest thing that describes my work. There’s a lot of pseudo science to what I do. The methodology, for example, has to be repeatable, I don’t go for one-offs,” he says.

At the same time, he tries to strike a balance between the rational and emotional elements to his work. “We live in a world which is very structured, logical, and even more standardised – if you look at the internet, globalisation and so on, we have a standardisation of image, of taste, of sound, of everything,” Galea says. “And I think my job is to investigate these standardisations and augment them, and reject them if needs be.”

The current area of Galea’s investigation is sound and music, but don’t expect any symphonies yet. Rather, he has chosen to apply the frequencies used in the Western music system and assign a frequency to each element in the periodic table.

“I started building things with these elements. I took the precious stones, rubies, emeralds and sapphire, took their chemical formulae and built an instrument which could recreate that same formula,” Galea says.

So we have a six-string harp called Ruby, a five-string guitar called Sapphire and a tuned idiophone (similar to a thumb piano) made of marble representing emerald.

“I see them as cognitive scaffolds to build thoughts. I built a three-string guitar representing water (two hydrogen, one oxygen). So what happens when you double water? When you double the octaves? Then you ask, what’s the double of oxygen? I think if a chemist looks at this, they might find a different way of looking at their subject.”

It’s something that defines you in a certain manner, your art

There have been more aesthetically pleasing instruments made than the guitar he made out of a box, but it appears this alchemist doesn’t care much. He is very attached to his works, and would only sell or trade them if he needed more material or tools to work with.

“I’ve been told they’re very interesting, but I never thought about that because what I was doing was very functional. I’m trying to eliminate vision. I’m trying to understand vision through the absence of it,” Galea says.

Bezzina’s work in XIV is more visual, but it too is built upon the artist’s reaction to his work and to artistic tradition. The head he has brought with him to the interview is rough and pimpled. It could be, for all we know, a work in progress.

What is that supposed to represent, I ask him. “What do you think it represents?” he retorts.

I say it’s a roughly-made head, and he nods in approval.

“It originated from a study in physiognomy, of what makes a good likeness, of what makes character,” the 23-year-old artist says.

“I looked at the works of a lot of artists, and I tried to get a good likeness, a physiognomically-correct sculpture or drawings. Then I started to question the fact of why I was trying to turn a head of clay into something resembling a person. And my interest in representation started waning, even though I was managing to capture features well,” Bezzina says.

“I think I will disappoint many people by showing these works, because they’ll think, why is he doing something which isn’t detailed?”

Entitled Homage, his series of works is a play on the word, because they are clearly not an homage to anyone in particular.

“While I was doing them I realised that although I was reducing the features of the head, or whatever it is, something else was sprouting, and it reveals something about each sculpture.”

He points at the sculpture over the café table, which looks like something out of Pompeii. “If you analyse the distance of the features from each other, I think this head could be that of a boy. The starting point was to make a head, but I had no idea whose head it would be,” he says. “I wanted to explore this idea of portraiture in a rougher texture.”

And in making these pieces, Bezzina finds he is learning more about himself: “Every work I do takes me closer to my under-standing of art, and of who I am. It’s something that defines you in a certain manner, your art.”

XIV opens this Friday at SouthPort Villa and Gardens, Marsaxlokk.

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