Gerald Brockhurst’s Adolescence.Casual visitors to the British Council’s Thresholds exhibition at St James Cavalier in Valletta may be forgiven for overlooking what must be the most significant aspect of the exhibition, its artist-curator Paula Rego.
The curator wants us to cultivate intimate relationships with images replete with little narratives and secrets- Raphael Vella
The quality of the works on view in the upper galleries is such that one could easily lose oneself in the individuality of the artists’ images without dedicating enough attention to the fact that this compilation is ultimately only a small selection of works from a much bigger collection of thousands of works that form the British Council art collection.
The rather bold, if not entirely idiosyncratic, hang of the ‘Thresholds’ works in Malta – different displays of these works, in fact, are not only allowed but even encouraged when they tour different venues – may also increase the likelihood that some visitors will enjoy the originality of the groupings of works in the four galleries without paying heed to the source of the distinctive curatorial choices that make up this gathering of British works of art.
Yet, if visitors left the exhibition with the impression that they had just experienced a representative survey of British art, they would be entirely mistaken.
The works in ‘Thresholds’ do not provide us with a straightforward summary of British art of the past 100 years or so, and this is not only due to the unfeasibility of such a task, given the plurality of directions in contemporary art and the complexity of recent British art in particular.
Beyond the undoubtedly distinctive merits of individual works or the list of important artists’ names in this exhibition (names like David Hockney, Cecil Beaton and Lucian Freud, for instance), the most intriguing aspect of ‘Thresholds’ is the weave of stories that Rego (with the help of her advisor Robert McPherson) has concocted by bringing together small drawings, prints and paintings that cry out for new interpretations as they come into contact with different audiences.
What ‘Thresholds’ affirms is the fact that the interpretation of works of art cannot be restricted to the creative or other intentions of the artists themselves but can be renewed almost indefinitely by being placed in new artistic dialogues with different works and different audiences.
In this sense, the curator’s selection of these images is itself a work of art, reflecting her creative interaction with the works of fellow artists. Even though Rego herself is not represented by an actual painting, print or drawing of her own in ‘Thresholds’, discerning eyes can detect her presence if they read between the lines and connect the exhibited works with her imagery and ideas.
As co-curator McPherson explained to me at St James Cavalier, it is not a coincidence that this collection of works was not called ‘Thresholds’ when it was shown in Porto in Rego’s country of birth, Portugal.
There, the title My Choice provided a clearer indication of the entirely personal nature of her selection of works that form part of her own history almost as much as they form part of the portfolio of the artists who produced them.
Rego’s forceful character led to some very decisive choices that conjure up her own artistic preference for figurative and narrative themes, portrayals of women, occasional references to Old Master paintings, and depictions of the various thresholds of life, like adolescence, sexuality and death.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the metaphorical threshold of a new stage in life more apparent than in the exhibition’s several references to adolescence, from Beaton’s very early My Sister Dressed as a Bridesmaid (1920) to Gerald Brockhurst’s masterly etching Adolescence (1932) and Tony Bevan’s large, haunting charcoal drawing of a boy (1992).
Freud’s two etchings of his daughter, (1982), also stand out in a group of drawings and prints on one of the walls of the largest room of the upper galleries.
More mysterious ‘thresholds’ are sensed in a handful of fascinating works by artists as diverse as Victor Willing (Rego’s husband), whose hallucinatory Night Growing Plants of 1960 shed long shadows in a metaphysical, yellow space, to Albert Richards’ gruesome landscape (1944) of German dead soldiers and horses – visible only when one is close enough to get a glimpse of what initially looks more like a depiction of a peacefulorchard.
The threat of death is not far from the surface in other works like Michael Andrews’ tiny painting that shows the artist hanging impossibly to his attendant’s hand as he falls down the side of a cliff, while Graham Sutherland’s Study No. 2 for ‘The Origins of the Land’ (1949), superbly occupying a wall in complete solitude at St James Cavalier, brings to life a strange, phallic form that seemingly howls through a gaping mouth at the orange environment which envelops it.
Sutherland’s diminutive work easily brings to mind the most well-known of his British contemporaries and the most obvious lacuna in the exhibition, Francis Bacon.
Yet since this exhibition was not intended to supply visitors with a comprehensive overview of British art. If this had been the case, there would be other unforgivable lacunae: the absence of sculpture or video, for instance.
What is clear from the works in ‘Thresholds’ is that the curator wants us to advance curiously towards her choice of small works in order to cultivate intimate relationships with images that are replete with little narratives and secrets.
By doing so, the new dialogues stimulated by these encounters revitalise the works and people’s interpretations of these images. This shallow space that separates each image from us, its audience, is the ultimate threshold that we must cross to appreciate these works.
As we do so, we realise that we were intended to form part of Rego’s exhibition from the start.
‘Thresholds’ marks the British Council’s 75th anniversary in Malta and is open at St James Cavalier, Valletta, until May 20.