Pathway to the End

Paraphrasing Borges, “landscape is an endless metaphor”, and at the heart of this metaphor is the strange collapse of experience and symbol into the communicable.

These vital communications sit at the heart of Damian Ebejer’s latest exhibition, Magdalene’s Tangerine.

Opened with an address by the mayor of Dingli, the exhibition speaks about Ebejer’s sense of the locality and its breath­taking landscapes.

Visitors to The Cliffs, a sustainably sourced restaurant and information centre perched on the edge of the island, are presented with a compact presentation of acrylics each painted on site around Dingli earlier this year.

Ebejer’s landscapes vibrate with life. Rock is warm, tingling, disclosing unexpected flashes of colour nestled in vast expanses of light. Dingli is figured through an ongoing conversation between the people who live there and the rock and vegetation, the sky and seascape they call home.

You, Me and Them

Church buildings break through the colossal verticality of stone; steps hewn by human hands spiral up the sheer cliff face. A sense of the numinous is never far beneath the surface of Ebejer’s canvases, and this exhibition is no exception.

Indeed, it clearly introduces a third player on the stage set by humanity and nature – a sense of grace, common to both. Coiling and undulated in the living rock, this tripartite relation-ship emerges in places of sustenance (For the Grain of Life), discernment (Cliffhanger) and con- templation (You, Me and Them).

The paintings communicate an atavistic feeling of space, so near to the Maltese experience of Malta. There is something of the shaman about Ebejer, clambering down the cliff with easel and paint to catch a glimpse of the solitary stones on his own intensely private journey.

Birth of a Seed

One wonders how these communications relate with his own (and his family’s) history of Dingli, urging a viewer to experience that same startling moment of recognition, half-forgotten childhood memories, an intangible connection with some ancient, ancestral wisdom.

The feeling is oppressive and liberating in one brush stroke. You, Me and Them depicts a rock-hewn bench at Il-Wardija ta’ San Ġorġ. It engages a viewer in curves of broad, bright stone, empty and yet already filled.

There are no people in any of the paintings, but their presence is felt everywhere. Perhaps that’s why the only figurative work is a portrait of the artist’s father, poet Francis Ebejer, who was born and raised in Dingli.

Beneath the Edge

The Depth of Silence continues the exhibition’s balance between representation and abstraction, depicting the cliff edge dissolving into lustrous, inky darkness. Layers of paint shimmer together beneath trembling curves of green and fuchsia. One of the more abstract pieces, Stairway to Heaven, is almost un-comfortable in its juxtaposition of incongruous pigments and flesh-like protuberances.

Steps and stairs and secret byways lead inexorably deeper into the rock, lost in the mystery of the stone. Pathway to the End (leading to Ta’ Torna) completes the thought, offering some respite from the claustrophobic enclosure in its graduated shapes and hopeful composition.

The artist described one of his last expeditions, brushes in hand, exploring Dingli. After he had set up his paints, a sudden burst of wind caught the blank canvas beneath his fingers. The canvas was tossed in the air and down the cliff, far out of reach. A gift for a gift.

Ebejer’s exhibition certainly presents us with gifts aplenty, visions of Malta that depart from the pedestrian views of the Grand Harbour and Mdina we have come to take for granted (would that a painter could make us see them again, as if for the first time!) and leads us by the hand to those inaccessible and forgotten places on the edge of the island, on the very edge of memory.

Magdalene’s Tangerine runs at The Cliffs, Dingli, until Thursday.