[attach id=202428 size="medium"]George Scicluna’s Composition with an Orange.[/attach]
Gozitan artist George Scicluna is exhibiting his works at the newly refurbished La Vallette VIP Club lounge at the Malta International Airport. The exhibition, Power and Passion, will run till the end of August and is the first in a series by Maltese artists programmed for this venue. Scicluna’s works include still lifes, landscapes and abstracts.
Scicluna’s series of still lifes are formidable in their neo-realism, in their modelled, sculptural tridimensional quality- E.V. Borg
Born in Victoria in 1966, Scicluna studied graphic design and art. He followed courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Perugia, Italy.
In 1996 he won first prize in a competition organised by the Brussels-based Robert Schuman Christian Democratic Foundation. He also organised four personal exhibitions in Gozo and participated in an exhibition in Scotland with Peter Howson.
In Scicluna’s art nothing is completely factual. But passion and power are explicit and the determination the artist shows in his portrait photograph on the cover is only a screen to hide his scrupulous indecision, his infinite search for meaning in art, in life.
Scicluna’s series of still lifes are formidable in their neo-realism, in their modelled, sculptural tridimensional quality. One discovers that almost tongue-in-cheek the artist placed the fruit and geometric objects as if they were people posing for a photograph. There is nothing natural in the set-up. The composition is posed and theatrical.
He pretends that each work is an academic exercise of classical proportions, with an eye to accuracy, with a tangible cubist twist and imbued with Cezanne’s determination towards permanence. But how permanent could a canvas be? Hence the illusion and disillusion and therefore the struggle to understand why Plato called art a ‘lie’. Because it’s not true, not real, but fiction.
In Composition with an Orange reality becomes surreal when the orange is metamorphosed into an apple, in the shadow cast on the wall behind it.
On the catalogue cover the artist’s photographic portrait is set against a painted skyline of the Gozo Cittadel with the photographed bastioned citadel forming a backdrop scenario. The painting is a ‘lie’ and the skyline is real or a photographic copy of reality. Art is three times removed from reality: the photographed portrait, the painted skyline and the photograph of the citadel.
Composition with 7-Up Bottle and Fruit is characteristic of the series. Saturated in light it is more of a Caravaggio piece than a studied academic still life. The bottle is a museum piece in its monumentality and vigour rather than a commercial advertisment. The artist chooses to paint the object not to trivialise art but for an entirely different purpose.
In Scicluna’s case art is vital as it is his life, his whole being and he wants to metamorphose his experience into a permanent expression, into works that one day will hang in museums as tangible proof of his existence. Perhaps this determination emanates from the fear of fear of losing life through death.
In the series of wall façades Scicluna chooses not to chose a subject. These façades of old houses are a study of stained masonry with pointing around the globigerina blocks. Without doors and windows they become blank surfaces transformed by the artist into colourful brush strokes that revolve with dynamic force. The artist is the result of his environment.
Scicluna is a powerful expressionist. He expresses life’s tragedy with a sense of drama and a feeling of grandeur.