The Robert Samut Hall in Floriana will next week host an ambitious event.

Crossing – A Journey through Music and Visual Art is an event featuring music composed by Simon Sammut and the visual art of Anthony Catania.

The purpose behind this project is to bring together these two art forms as it creates a merging of space, form, beauty and colour. Both forms express emotion and ideas and could be made to work together in creating something really striking.

“Twelve compositions make up the project. The music score and the complementary paintings revolve around the common theme of ‘crossing’… of boundaries whether physical, geographical, intellectual or psychological reference to moments in history or a story or a cognitive state,” says Sammut.

Catania insists that his art’s vision developed over time.

“At this point in my career,” he says, “I felt the need to examine and explore new ways of conveying a message, scene or story through music and visual art on the common theme of ‘crossing’. The sub-themes have been carefully researched and the music score and the paintings have been composed and painted to reflect their mood and nature as well as the scene and message presented to the audience.”

Sammut is a very active composer, arranger, producer and teacher often performing solo or in bands. He was born to a musical family being the younger son of well-known maestro Joseph Sammut whose own father had been a member of the Teatru Rjal’s orchestra.

Both forms express emotion and ideas

It was Simon’s father who after the young boy had already studied the piano for some years gave him his first lessons in double bass as, early in his career, he had been a bass player.

Still in his early teens Simon had become enchanted with the legendary sound of Jaco Pastorius, Francis Rocco Prestia of funk band Tower and Power, Larry Graham and Verdine White of Earth, Wind and Fire.

He learned the electric bass and developed a very eclectic taste at 15 joining Hangover, his first rock band. Later he moved to jazz via rock, blues, soul and funk.

Samples of the paintings being prepared by Anthony Catania.

In 2011, Sammut released his first CD BaSSic Attitude in collaboration with the multi-instrumentalist Alexander Kuzmen. It was very well received and has been critically described as “a fine jewel of bass goodness and its eight tracks traverse jazz, soul, funk and pop. It includes the slow grooving ballad Recollection, the Latin-flavoured Dos Hijas, the funky Another Song and the feel-good Second Avenue.

The way Catania depicts myths and fables both enchant and repel.  It results in entirely idiosyncratic portraits of legendary beings in unconventional settings. One could not categorise his style: his technique is indebted to the Old Masters spanning from the cave artists of Lascaux to contemporary graphic novel artists.

His works are windows providing a glimpse at alternative worlds darkly seen through a glass. Catania’s personal exhibitions Selve Oscure, The Cave of Centaurs, The Piper’s Requiem and The Spectro-Bank revisited Dante, Ovid, Coleridge and fabled stories.

His allegorical experimentation transformed these myths into dark, distorted hyperbolic visualisation of wispy elongated limbs and mottled macabre fantasies.

“Although dominated by black,” says Catania, “my fragmented and decentred palette also incorporates Byzantine golden hues, blood reds, marine blues, astral whites and dark earth colours.”

His latest exhibition, Last Light, is the archetypal representation of death itself in the process of being annihilated. It is the death of the future and the past, the demise of its ancient Greek and St John’s Apocalyptic representations.  It is death which dissolves into nothingness.

Musicians taking part are Tony Sammut and Mark Attard (pianos); Melchior Busuttil (drums and percussion); Marc Galea (classical and electric guitar); Jonathan Ellul (electric guitar); Kris Spiteri (melodica); Kevin Abela (trumpet); Ivan Borg (tenor sax); Godfrey Mifsud (baritone sax); Jesmond Azzopardi (bass trombone); Marlene Sammut (voice) and Simon Sammut (upright bass and electric basses).

Crossing – A Journey through Music and Visual Art is being held at Robert Samut Hall on Friday, May 19, at 8pm. Doors open at 7.30pm. Tickets, whose price includes a CD album and full-colour booklet, may be obtained online at www.ticketline.com.mt.