Alla Alamango invites us to question the preconceptions and bias against the digital world. Review by Joe Agius.

You can say it with flowers. These six words have been used and misused on many occasions, earning for themselves cliché status. Their elegant meaning has been misinterpreted and their poetry lost on a society that sucks up to meaningless slogans.

 These same words could be an answer to a question which is so bewildering to many in this age of virtual relationships. The syntax of the 21st century has lost its ability to communicate raw emotions.

Foreboding

Texting has replaced interpersonal expression – what is known as the digital age is not only about informatics, statistics and data processing.

Fingers have become ‘digits’ that tap a phone or laptop screen to convey ideas, display anger, fix appointments and acronymise basic human behaviour. Contemporary reality has reached a condition where actual conversation encroaches on daily routine.

Excessive display of emotion is constituted by its mere verbalisation – an act that could possibly dent the cocoon which protects posthuman beings from the pain and disappointment of their human condition.

In Alla Alamango’s solo exhibition, Unveil, are paintings of flowers that appear reactionary and deceptively anachronistic in subject matter.

These floral deluges are pure and obstinate. Like Gustav Klimt’s flower gardens, they exclude all possible non-floral contamination in a tight perspective that is all-enveloping and overpowering. 

They are soft, billowing gravestones that kindle memories of heady fragrances of halcyon summer days – when fun was to be had in candidly chasing friends across wide open fields. Grazed knees and bruised foreheads were trophies displayed proudly to family and friends. Explosions of sudden laughter or outcries of pain were vocal, natural and exhilarating, with no acronyms or emoticons needed to display this.

Alamango refers to this evocative group of paintings as her Fractal Flowers. The term ‘fractal’ belongs to chaos theory, which postulates endless repetition in all natural and not so natural phenomena.

Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot proposed this in the mid-1970s, emphasising the evolving symmetry that governs the cosmos around us. Computer simulations are the only way we can access the magical beauty of the fractal world.

Fractal Flowers

The artist, rather polemically, invites us to rethink and question the preconceptions and bias against the digital world. Her flowers originate from her actual visual and olfactory experience of them. Like Magritte in his surrealist masterpiece Ceci n’est pas une pipe, she questions the veracity of her floral representations by attributing to them fractal terminology from the unreal world of theoretical mathematics. Alamango’s works seem to beckon the observations made by French philosopher Michel Foucault:

“All around the recognised word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning.”

Alamango’s solo exhibition also showcases powerful portraits which similarly exclude all contamination – this time of a masculine nature. Her proud, emancipated women are sometimes adorned with floral motifs which coyly shroud the subjects in a Klimt-like tunic, adding to their sensuality. Semiotically, women and flowers are intimately related. A woman is said to be in full bloom when she menstruates for the first time, signifying that she is therefore biologically capable of motherhood. Deflowering, rather chauvinistically, refers to the loss of female virginity following her first sexual experience.

Semiotically, women and flowers are intimately related. A woman is said to be in full bloom when she menstruates for the first time, signifying that she is therefore biologically capable of motherhood

Alamango challenges the male ego and derides the machismo of male sexuality. Here are the visages of liberated women who do seek sexual intimacy, but who set the rules of the game. They are also comfortable in the solitude beneath the flowery shroud of their own, intimate world.

Fauvist artist Kees Van Dongen, originally referred to as “the painter of brothels”, was destined to become a high-society darling as his career progressed. It is the flamboyant hat that first meets the eye in some of his expressionist portraits, which are of seminal importance to the genre. Similarly, Alamango has donned the figures in Homeless Singer and Foreboding with vibrant red hats, complemented by their similarly nuanced pursed lips.

The subject in the former work begs for alms as she sings her heart out to make a living – she is one upon whom Lady Luck has not smiled. In Foreboding, the black gap between the lips emphasises the sense of perturbation. Something ominous lurks somewhere in front of this lady, causing her to gasp uncontrollably as she stares at us in dismay. It is perhaps we who are the cause of her discomfort as she cranes her neck to focus on us. Her red hat stays firmly attached to a black string around her chin; no blustering wind can blow it off. As she fights to maintain a grip on reality, she certainly cannot afford to lose her hat too.

The expressionist vigour of other portraits in this collection by Alamango comes across as a message of grief, despair and mental instability. The whips of the brushstrokes display a certain urgency in execution which, according to the artist herself, is beyond her conscious control.

Elena

She claims that, on some occasions, she is coerced to paint by an unknown force within her – and what is resultantly manifested in these works is otherworldly. The thick, Soutine-like application of paint oozes like plasma over the canvas, congealing and thereafter revealing creatures that scream and jeer with joyless mirth.

They scornfully narrate stories of bedlam, bloodlust and depravity. Distinctly, Crying Soul has that deceptively simple Frank Auerbach-like quality in which the facial features are reduced to mere chasms.

This solo exhibition is a visual treat that Le Parisien of Mosta Road, Attard is graciously hosting at its premises up to May 6. It introduces an original artistic vision that should capture the attention of the Maltese art-loving public.

Alamango’s oeuvre evocatively evokes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s superb image Earth laughs in flowers, made evident in the comfort of her Fractal Flowers. But it also reminds us that occasionally, our dear Mother Earth falls nauseous, spewing up magma that cremates and consumes.