Contemporary composer and visual artist Pawlu Grech will be showcasing a selection of paintings and piano works – some of which for the first time ever – during an evening themed Departures.

Pianist Ramona Zammit Formosa with Pawlu Grech.

The event, to be held on Friday in the concert hall of Palazzo de la Salle – the seat of the Malta Society of Arts in Valletta – will celebrate Grech’s artistic career, starting off with a piano recital by Ramona Zammit Formosa, followed by a talk on the composer’s life and art by Dr Silvio John Camilleri, an exhibition titled Pawlu Grech: A Life in Perspective and a reception.

Grech’s art follows in the line of Klee and Kandinsky, and his music in the footsteps of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, with the latter actually acknowledging and supporting his work.

Dissatisfied with the classical tradition and its reliance on dogmatic rules, Grech is one of the few Maltese artists to have taken up the rallying cry in the 20th century rebellion against the musical mainstream. Grech’s visual art follows the same pattern and his paintings, rather than attempting to figure the world as it is seen, attempt to interrogate the patterns and rules that underlie the everyday world by departing from them, presenting their absence and thereby lifting them into the sphere of attention.

Grech’s first set of compositions are collectively titled Fantasia, as they are, in his own words “a departure into my own fantasies”. A number of these yet unpublished and never publicly performed works will be premiered by Ramona Zammit Formosa, one of Grech’s former students, in the first half of the concert. A few of his early paintings will also be hung in the Palazzo’s courtyard.

Grech’s later works mark a clear break with conventional musical form, often being atonal and centred around the repetition and development of a basic theme. He departs into his own unique world of musical exploration and develops to the full the alternative routes of musical aesthetic sighted down in his early years.

Some visual works from the artist’s mature period will accompany his early paintings.

Silvio John Camilleri will be addressing a short talk which will revolve around the link between the visual and aural dimensions of Grech’s oeuvres.

Gabriel Zammit, the producer, writes that “Pawlu is a surgeon of the real. By parsing apart musical form and exploring the inner mechanisms of artistic language, he sheds light on our place in the world. One can opine that musical rules are reflective of the more general logic we use to understand the reality we function in. By breaking these rules and expanding them, pushing boundaries and exploring unexplored possibilities, Pawlu encourages us to reflect on the manner in which we see things in the first place.”

Departures, to be held on Friday at 8pm at Palazzo de la Salle, Valletta, is a project supported by the Arts Council Malta – Malta Arts Fund. For more information, visit http://artsmalta.org or https://www.facebook.com/events/2408632792514295/. Tickets, costing €10, are available at https://tinyurl.com/PawluGrech.