With a tendency to seek new pastures and challenges in the course of their lifetime, artists usually cannot be tied down to a single genre. There are some, however, who are seen to be almost exclusively synonymous with, and to define a particular genre.

Girl On A Purple Stool

Italian giant Giorgio Morandi’s fame lies mainly with his repertoire of still-life works, while portraits are Amadeo Modigliani’s claim to immortality. Similarly, Johanna Barthet has carved a space for herself in the Maltese contemporary art scene via a genre that is erroneously and somewhat hurriedly dispatched as passé.

Barthet’s portraiture within a wider context

The quest by new galleries to be ultra-contemporary has suffocated Maltese art with a load of outdated conceptual clichés and late-90s post-Dada attempts at the outrageous. Yet the world beyond our shores has moved on, and portraiture has evolved in leaps and bounds via the work of Chantal Joffe, Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton, and Barbara Kroll, among others. The common female denominator is entirely coincidental.

A cursory look at the history of early 20th-century portraiture reveals female artists like Gwen John, Nella Marchesini and Paula Modersohn-Becker. All three excelled in capturing the human likeness and produced endearing representations of humankind. Like Barthet, they chose portraiture as their means of expression, irrespective of any commissions by patrons.

Girl With Pink Hair

Essentially, portraiture for these artists was a means to an end: to translate their intimate emotions onto a canvas. And they succeeded in much the same way as any of their colleagues who had chosen alternative genres to achieve the same goal.

Stories Untold was the title of the Maltese artist’s recent exhibition at Palazzo de Piro in Mdina. One can regard the collection as an anthology of anecdotes whose protagonists are frozen in time and space. Each portrait is pregnant with meaning, very much in the same spirit as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa story is shrouded in a conundrum of elusive clues. At times, it hints at some resolution of the mystery, while at others it contrives to deepen its ambiguity even further into conspiracy theory. The identity of Leonardo’s sitter is a 500-year-old secret, shrouded in a veil of lore and myth. The anthology is lacking an individual and officially registered identity.

Girl In A Purple Coat

Barthet works in an unorthodox way to gene­rate this same effect. She transfers subjects from fashion magazine pictures and reinvents them as doppelgangers in her own work. As she wrests them away from their original context, she breathes new life into these characters, featuring them as the heroines of stories that are waiting to be told.

The artist also accesses social media platforms such as Instagram to seek material for her work. Her artistic process is one of reinvention and re-evaluation. The words of Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello ring true here, as these girls and women in magazines and on social media platforms are like “so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us and make us talk”. Through her art, Johanna Barthet achieves this in a most poetic and poignant way, as though she is releasing these females from their imprisonment.

One could attempt a feminist interpretation of Barthet’s preferred choice of the female gender for her subject matter. British artist Chantal Joffe, who incidentally is very much admired by Barthet, also claimed that “I really love painting women. Their bodies, their clothes – it all interests me, whereas men really don’t that much, in a way.” Similarly, the exclusion in Barthet’s oeuvre seems to be deliberate, and one might postulate that the male ingredient may be considered less appealing because of its rash, unrefined two-dimensionality and lack of depth for interesting storytelling.

Moreover, Barthet asserts that her portraits are essentially conceived as self-portraits in solitude and that, in a way, they all contribute to her autobiography. They are diaries in the sense that they document her emotions, her moods, and quite possibly her life history.

They are diaries in the sense that they document her emotions, her moods, and quite possibly her life history

Barthet’s interest in fashion, especially that of the belle époque, adorns her subjects with a beguiling but wistful flamboyance. One of her desired future projects is to portray a transgender sitter. The artist’s ideas seem to indicate a necessity for the male gender and ‘excess’ testosterone to be effaced from the work. This is how she appears to arrive at a balanced equation – which is a predominant quality of her art.

Girl With Cat

Chaim Soutine is another artist admired by Barthet. Yet the large, painful brushstrokes of the Franco-Russian painter’s portraits express a vernacular that does not belong in her dictionary. In this aspect, Soutine, whose canvases are a vortex of overpowering masculine emotions, indicates a way forward in her technique and concepts. A foray outside Barthet’s comfort zone might hypothetically reveal alternative aspects, through which untold stories can yield a different storytelling dimension and epilogue.

Feline companionship and femininity

Artists such as Suzanne Valadon, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Pierre Bonnard introduced cats in some of their paintings. The cats in Vala­don’s works are regal when depicted on their own. When both cat and owner appear as subjects, with the latter being generally female in both Valadon and Modersohn-Becker’s works, the bond that exists between the two looks is always unselfconscious and natural. Here, the human-feline relationship is one of equals.

Some of the sitters in Modersohn-Becker’s works happen to be children who almost gingerly cradle the cat in a demonstration of simultaneous and mutual love and doubt. Most of the cats in the Intimist paintings of Pierre Bonnard have no human being shackling their movement, which is reflected in their candour and nonchalance.

Girl With White Fur

Bonnard was a master at capturing the domestic timeless instant of any anonymous day. Cats are associated with transformation, as they are generally unpredictable in nature. They evoke different emotions in different people. Just like Bonnard’s cats, they can be easily domesticated, yet they can regain their innate predatoriness in an instant if released into the wild.

Barthet used to feel uncomfortable around pets. However, this changed into love when her husband brought her a kitten as a gift. Two other cats eventually joined the household, and all three became the artist’s models. She introduced them in three of her stories as cuddly pets, where they are depicted in a style that is quite reminiscent of Modersohn-Becker.

Some cultures endow canines with masculinity and bestow femininity on felines. The feline component in this Maltese artist’s work reinforces the femininity of the sitters in an aura of sublime vulnerability.

Self Portrait

A progressive step back into portrait practice

One has to admire Barthet’s enterprise in the age of digital photography. Portraits can be Photoshopped to perfection with all flaws, artistic or otherwise, removed at the click of a button. The result is almost instant and satisfies the needs of a contemporary society that is all about the right here, right now.

Painterly portraiture is a reaction to all of this, as Barthet insists that beauty lies in the imperfections. Digital portraiture is a fake take on reality as nobody is perfect. Barthet’s sourcing of material on Instagram, among other platforms, sees her removing the mask of Photoshopped fakeness, as she reinvents her chosen listless characters. It is in this way that they are redeemed and become protagonists. It is in uncovering the ordinary beneath the artifice, in the search for the pain that lies beneath all artifice, in adulterated life itself that one can encounter the spirit of her Stories Untold.  

Red-haired Girl Under Umbrella

In the mid-18th century, the camera threatened to ring the death knell of portrait painting. Celebrated high-calibre artists such as Jean Dominique Ingres faced redundancy, being unable to reproduce the optical perfection of the photograph. Fortunately, portraiture proved resilient, evolving into the phenomenal works of Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani, Warhol, Freud, and Bacon, among others. The portrait painting genre is still very much alive and kicking in the international contemporary art world. In Malta, a number of art galleries give it the cold shoulder, arguing that portraits are personal to their creator and therefore do not appeal to a wider audience. This argument does not hold water in view of Barthet’s oeuvre, with the vast majority of her portraits revealing an impersonal origin.

Malta has a strong legacy of outstanding portrait painters. The 20th century alone can boast of the likes of the mature Giuseppe Calì, Edward Caruana Dingli, Giorgio Preca, Willie Apap, Esprit Barthet and Raymond Pitré. Antoine Camilleri excelled in self-portraiture.

With Barthet, Maltese portraiture has found a champion to carry it into the 21st century. What might be considered too humbling a task for many is not beyond the capabilities of this brilliant artist, a chronicler of disoriented ‘characters in search of an artist’.