Expressive Vision is an exhibition of 30 paintings by Vincent Abdilla recently inaugurated at the Mġarr council premises.
Abdilla is a vigorous Expressionst. His romantic vision interprets life’s harsh reality in a personal acute idiom in chromatic colours with a mannerist stance. His work is implicitly influenced by Tintoretto and El Greco and explicitly by Matisse, Vlaminck and Roulaut.
His colours, almost straight from the tube, are somewhat dark and sombre and emanate a certain roughness and rusticity. Such vision is related to his stark realism, the result of his intimate connection with the land in which he works to earn a living. The frugality, the roughness and hard life of the farmer is boldly expressed in his work.
The variety of subjects treated by the artist demonstrates his long academic studies at the local School of Art under Harry Alden and Esprit Barthet and his ample talents in composition and design.
A rare expressive work is his Last Supper, after Tintoretto, a large canvas in a vertical composition with exaggerated perspective to create tension and stress. His sacred art has an emotional and a dramatic vision, seen especially in Pietà and Our Lady of Sorrows. His strength is in creating drama through emotion.
Abdilla’s nudes are monumental and remind me of Signorelli’s frescoes in the San Brisio chapel in Orvieto cathedral. Bold, solid, heavy and muscled, these nudes reflect the sturdy peasant stock that the farmer artist encountered in his daily toil in Żurrieq and Mġarr. There is a certain freedom of movement in the long limbs and contorted bodies that denote liberty of action in space.
A wonderful landscape is surely inspired by Cezanne’s obsession with Mont Sainte-Victoire, while his series of expressive portrait heads document the people in his village of Mġarr.
His abstracts refer to the mysticism of Kandinsky. In a particular abstract Abdilla cakes the paint so thick that the painting almost becomes a low relief sculpture.
His vision is so vigorous that he turns flat surfaces into moulded forms and volumes.
The exhibition will remain open until December 31.