Self-portraits by the artist.

The wish for absolute freedom is one of the main desires of all contemporary artistic movements. Modern artists seek to express themselves by not following the canons of artistic theory or representation. Much of the art we see today is a mass of inchoate ideas, of feelings that are buried in the psyche, of reverberant sensual perceptions that continually beseech the artist.

This introductory paragraph fully suits the art of Godwin Cutajar, whose works were recently exhibited at art..e Gallery of Victoria, Gozo. The artist engages the viewer as he emerges from each and every work. At times sideways, frontally in other instances; daring the onlooker to fix his sight on each auto-portrait.

In one painting, My Mama and Papa, the artist stands between his parents and insinuates his self-portrait as a silk-print. On his part Cutajar possesses no inhibitions as every time he depicts himself boldly in the nude.

The viewer may easily distinguish a sense of narcissism

Each painting is a self-contained monad that engulfs a whole universe that exists only in it. Except for two instances the artist is in the company of a female that possesses the facial physiognomy of a South Sea woman. The sources for this Gauguin-esque maiden can be manifold. One of the reasons may be that Cutajar is in a perennial quest for an exotic companion, a friend that deludes him and whom he cannot find in these small islands.

It may very well be that Cutajar is construing his works as an ongoing exercise in what Victor I. Stoichita calls “contextual self-projection”. Self-projection can be defined as the way in which Cutajar represents or construes others’ viewpoints of himself as a social object.

Self-projection is to be related to trait measures of self-esteem and social anxiety. Additionally, self-projection predicts emotions, self-evaluations and aspects of performance. These descriptions fall exactly into place when one connects the works to the performance that Cutajar played out during the opening of the exhibition.

On his part, the artist discards his clothes as if he wants to live in the Garden of Eden, in a primitive, untroubled environment. Simultaneously, the viewer may easily distinguish a sense of narcissism, of self-indulgence at the same time of shirking responsibility. This inner preoccupation of the artist with himself would be the reason why he finds difficulty with his social bonding. In fact, there exists no eye contact between the artist and his damsel, even though both appear to acknowledge each other’s presence. This is a remnant, or a continuation, of Cutajar’s previous exhibition in the same gallery a year ago.