Encompassing dynamics

Dynamicity is the name of the game. And yet this exhibition is entitled De-Coding Beauty and is an evolving exercise in a de-fragmentation of images and souls through time and space. This is the art of George Scicluna, a Gozitan who is exhibiting for the very first time here in Malta. He is not, however, a newcomer to the art scene but has been quietly showing his work in Gozo since 1990 when he embarked on his artistic journey, punctuating this secluded presence by exhibiting in Glasgow with an international name, that of Scottish Peter Howson in April 2006.

There is something stridently unique about Mr Scicluna's work. The first thing that impresses upon the viewer is the energy that seems to be imparted onto the canvasses with a seemingly minimum of effort. Yet each picture is imbued with swinging expansive arches that vie with each other for perfection, harmony and structural composition, each and every one created by a human compass that is engineered by the artist's own hand and body, and guided by his own passionate flair.

The works are all about unleashed energy and the entrapment of the figure by its soul, or is it the other way round after all? Each picture requires time and effort and concentration to be de-codified. Not because the figures aren't all legible, but because like some three-dimensional holographic image, each painting requires the viewer's collaboration.

Unlike a holographic card which you can grab in your hands and move this way and that to allow the diverse images entrapped within to emerge, these paintings cannot be moved about especially since most are quite large. But standing in front of the gigantic oil, In Memory of George Dyer & Francis Bacon Simultaneously - after Francis Bacon, I find myself moving around the painting, this way, that way and discovering a new perspective from each angle. It, like many of the others, is not a statue in the round, but in some instances it could very well be. And I realise that only time and many musings over it will divulge what its semi-obscurity valiantly attempts to disguise.

And yet the artist is extremely parsimonious with his paint. He admits that he likes to let his canvasses "breathe" and never ever suffocates them with too much paint.

Even where patches of paint seem to try to take over, he allows the canvas to emerge unscathed at least on the very extreme diagonal corners, as if to prove to the viewer that this is after all a painting, an impression made in time, in a space and in passing by a soul that sought rendition, and not realism incarnate. The underlying sketches in pencil are perennially visible, like mathematical engineered sketches that Scicluna still wants to allow for posterity, to testify his studied effort. And while in some instances the canvasses are graced with oils or mixed media, others are practically devoid of real colour and are instead simply an earthy monochrome.

From the initial 1990 pencil drawings where the first expansive arches are tried and tested and nudes start moving tentatively like some wooden drawing dummies that have had life breathed in them and have morphed into statues of antiquity, the works move on through the different phases of Mr Scicluna's development until the latest ones within the collection.

This is where things traipse a step further on with a distinguishable sigh of happy relief. Still, transparencies are the order of the game here, but this time colours come to life resplendently in mosaic-like patches that lose nothing of the rhythm of structure but alleviate the paintings of a strenuous quality that somehow manages to triumphantly evolve into bursts of pleasure.

• De-Coding Beauty is at Auberge d'Italie, Merchants Street, Valletta until Wednesday.