It’s always interesting to see a space come alive not as a result of the artist, but the curator. That editorial hand which deftly selects, places, rearranges and manoeuvres according to its own agenda.

Looking at Camilleri’s paintings, one can see the ebb and flow of two realities coming together, the past looking (through slowly closing shutters) into the present

With any work of art, we are taken beyond the confines of the work itself to a place where intended ideas become almost irrelevant. A good curator’s job is, in effect, to harness that discursive potential and redirect it to the benefit of both artist and viewer.

Has that happened here?

It all depends on the standard to which we hold ourselves. The shadows of Barr, Spector, and Schaffner are long and unforgiving.

It is all too common to attend a show and spend the better part of one’s time feeling blindly for some thread of commonality, before grabbing a glass of wine and latching on to the nearest acquaintance. The art hangs mute on the wall. That is, until you bump into the artist and have him explain it to you.

We are living through a historical period where the unifying potential of some shared artistic language is lacking (and no, relational aesthetics and the cult of ‘recycled garbage’ don’t count).

This Babel has been championed, violently, by many people – but looking up at walls, all white, to pictures, all ineffable, one would be forgiven for thinking that some kind of lingua franca wouldn’t go amiss.

We are more pleasantly human when we connect with one another, rather than revelling in our disparate existences.

And this is what might have happened in Opus 64 Galerie’s latest exhibition, drawn together by its new curator Katarina Lennmarker.

The gallery was effectively divided across the middle, with each artist’s work occupying one wall – Germany to the right, Gozo to the left.

While Austin Camilleri’s large red canvases were eye catching, I found myself first drawn to the altogether quieter world of Wertenbruch’s geometrics.

Dating from the 1990s through to the mid noughties, they form a language of lines and directed movement. Each image is a meditation, painstakingly layered in oils until the surface is as deeply lustrous as ink.

Speaking with Wertenbruch he says, “they are pictures of families. Parents who separate, make new families, a beautiful patchwork. These are the lines, cutting across the darkness, where everybody has their own way.”

He explores the pictures in terms of harmony, iconic representations of our time stripped of its frenetic pace to the bare essentials, the most important social unit.

“There is now so much information, so many influences, everything is so loud. My pictures are not that, to me this reality becomes calm.” We stand outside the gallery and he gestures to the sky. “There is no end to space and we are here, alone, like lines in the darkness.”

The conversation put me in mind of something Genet said about dreaming, nursed in darkness, and dreams that give birth to grandeur.

The wall full of red and orange by Austin Camilleri, most impressively the massive Narilmarija, creates a rather different relationship with the viewer. “The concept is more important than the painting,” insists Camilleri.

It’s all raw energy, the collision of thought and process. “I care about the modus operandi”, he says. “I care about the passion”.

Looking at his paintings, one can see the ebb and flow of two realities coming together, the past looking (through slowly closing shutters) into the present.

Certainly the pictures are linked by the spatial relationship that boldly contrasts each image, by a use of layering in both artists’ work.

It was interesting to discover that the artists had never met one another till the opening. All the interaction, at least between their works, had occurred through the mediumship of Lennmarker.

It must be a strange feeling to walk into the gallery and overhear a conversation, one that you are seemingly having with a complete stranger, through the voice of another person.

The distance between artist and art work may seem even more considerable when one discovers that the paintings are not reflective of their current projects.

Camilleri has moved on since his large red canvases, Wertenbruch’s geometry is less austere and more forgiving. Still, perhaps it’s all just another layer to the story - another line drawn in the darkness.

Wertenbruch feat. Camilleri redux is showing at Opus 64 Galerie, Sliema, until Saturday.