A series of lectures being organised by the Department of History of Art at the University of Malta are working to place the Maltese artistic context within international accademia.
From our churches to our towns to our very homes, the baroque aesthetic and its principles are found all over Malta. This particular style of organising our visual and built environment has long had a strong effect in Malta, but there is a case to be made that this classical style still has connections with contemporary art.
That case is partly made by looking at the ceramic productions of Lucio Fontana, where one could see his conception of space in time betray the link between baroque and contemporary art. During World War II, while he was back in Argentina, he started developing his idea of the baroque as an endless source of inspiration. His subsequent works would present baroque as the predominant art movement, the one that, better than everything else, understood the centrality of time and movement.
Even in Maltese contemporary art it’s easy to find the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, baroque influence. As such, The Mediterranean Reception of Lucio Fontana’s Baroque Continuum was recently organised as part of a series by the Modern and Contemporary Art Research Programme at the Department of History of Art at the University of Malta to discuss this connection. In particular, they wanted to discuss the artist’s legacy and dynamism in the ceramic arts of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular Maltese case-study: Gabriel Caruana.
“The reason for looking at the relationship between 20th-century ceramics and the baroque was not to identify the baroque in them, but to understand how these works interfere with our conventional understanding of the baroque past,” says Nikki Petroni, conference coordinator. “‘We look at the Baroque as the style of Malta’s traditional past. However, we do not really question the baroque image, its power of conveyance, liberation of form and colour, resistance to ordered compositional arrangements. There is a crucial difference between copying the baroque and absorbing its visual principles to create new works of art.”
She explains that elements found in baroque art can also be spotted in contemporary works. “The abstract qualities of the baroque emerge strongly in the ceramics of the artists discussed during the conference: dynamism, tension, movement, fluidity, dramatic gestures, and others,” she says. “These reappeared under very different socio-political conditions and were explicitly transformed by artists. It is important to ask why the past resonates in such works and to see what it tells us about the modern era.”
Even in Maltese contemporary art it’s easy to find the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, baroque influence
The concepts of time, space, movement and ornament are, in fact, particularly important for different artists, among which one can include both modern and contemporary artists such as Robert Picault, Llorens Artigas and Grayson Perry. With this context in mind, the ceramics of artist Gabriel Caruana, one of the leading artists in Malta, was analysed within the context of this international network of pioneering ceramicists.
“The main academic objective is to first juxtapose the development of Maltese art within an international context... to then challenge the traditional approach of isolating the Maltese situation and put Maltese milestone developments within a broader context and to, finally, choose Maltese artists who were proposing alternatives to/for modernism,” says Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, who was organising the conference.
Schembri Bonaci went on to talk about his belief in the export of ideas, the only resource Malta has, as he says.
“Export of ideas can be achieved by participating in activities abroad, something which has already been done and is still ongoing. But, we may also export ideas by provoking foreign interest in our art history and contemporary/modern scene. This was beautifully achieved when one looks at the Musee Rodin in Paris or the Kesselhaus Josephsohn in Switzerland, discussing the relationship between Kalleya, Rodin, Mestrovic, Josephsohn and others.
The Fontana-Caruana Conference saw international experts putting Caruana in context with Fontana, Melotti and Gaudi. Next year we will be having experts dealing with Giorgio Preca and Dufy and the French Fauvists,” he points out.
Schembri Bonaci’s placement of Maltese artists among their international contemporaries can perfectly exhibit the similarities, and indeed differences, in their works. “Malta has to qualify its decades of just importing,” he continues. “We need to change gear and start aggressively exporting our own alternatives and proposals in all spheres, and particularly for us, art ideas and radical approaches.”
He also mentions another facet of export: artists who worked in Malta like Caravaggio, Preti or Burgess. “When they came to Malta, they were not encased in some vacuum,” he says. “We have to appropriate their works into our own worldview and discern the Maltese identity in their development.”
“And this is what this series of University conferences is trying to do – put the Malta context within an international academia,” Schembri Bonaci concludes.
Malta’s traditional look might have more in common with the contemporary than we would have previously realised and, as the Department of History of Art sees it, comparing Maltese artists in an international arena is one way of finding out.