“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” – John Cage
The uncanny portrayal of the apparent commonplace in the art of Alex Dalli induces a sense of spiritual well-being in its audience: an internal balance that the chaos of contemporary daily existence sends into relentless disarray, our senses being overwhelmed with noise and news.
Art has the honest tendency to follow life as we know and experience it. Dalli’s life story is his own particular one and he projects that asceticism onto his minimalist works. His art mirrors his life, and one may hazard to claim that he is an iconoclast in our age of informatics junkies, traffic jams and deadlines.
Dalli’s early path as an artist was moulded by the counsel of his tutors during his student days.
George Fenech, Esprit Barthet and Harry Alden were inspirational in different ways. One can find traces of Fenech’s soft palette, the geometrical rhythm of Barthet’s composition and the hard edge technique of Alden. As a younger artist Dalli interpreted their teachings and incorporated them into his work. The colour field minimalist works of Mark Rothko and, to a lesser extent, those by Barnett Newman, were an early influence too.
Along the years, Dalli came across the work of Edward Hopper and Giorgio Morandi. The Italian still-life master lived a cocooned existence in which a select number of humble vessels provided subject matter to last him a lifetime. He elevated these commonplace objects to a devotional dignity, and in this manner immortalised them for posterity.
Morandi was a master in portraying the silence of his sacred, shrine-like studio and the music of vacant spaces. Dalli is a worthy follower of Morandi. His choice of lowly corners, nondescript stones, windows, fragile flowers and solitary characters enveloped in their own world does not compose the usual subject matter for contemporary artists. He is the quiet dissenter in a world where the shocking has become the commonplace.
Dalli projects asceticism onto his minimalist works
The global village has facilitated the removal of boundaries that kept artistic movements almost chained to their respective countries in the past. The 20th century’s prodigious number of isms that followed each other bore a very strong geographical and national identity, although these artistic movements encompassed artists from different countries of origin.
In the 21st century, the whole planet seems to have shrunk into one bubbling mass of ideas, concepts and perturbations. Contemporary Maltese art is not immune to this world scenario. Exhibitions of video installations and conceptual art regularly provoke a sense of discomfort, outrage, disgust, empathy or total indifference among local audiences. In this regard, Duchamp’s famous question “Can works be made which are not ‘of art’?” seems to carry considerable significance.
Dalli’s art does not bother itself with answering artistic conundrums. He does not need to instigate scandal in a world that has become impervious to wars, murders and corruption. His works shock by reaching for the strings of one’s soul, reminding us that art can be sublimely effective by wrenching us out of the stupor of contemporary everyday existence.
In a world gone haywire, the spirit still exists – in the form of shadows produced by the stark Mediterranean sunlight of Dalli’s minimalist landscapes; a mother holding her newborn child as she descends the stairs; an arch that is a shrine for a solitary lantern hanging on a chain and its tiny flickering flame. These are studies in profound introspection, reflections on experience, a soft stranglehold on nostalgia in ardent hope that not all is lost.
Any trace of human existence is reduced to a bare minimum. Sometimes it appears fragile and worthy of compassion, as is the downcast man in Mixja. It is like the small yellow flower in Siekta or the lowly snail in Bħal Bebbuxu, all alone in the overwhelming void. There is some comfort in knowing that the yellow flower is firmly rooted into the ground and that the snail has a shell to abscond in.
Humanity in Dalli’s paintings is portrayed as paradoxically puny and inadequate when left to its own devices, while still bearing that deeply ingrained, terrible instinct to intrude, possess and contaminate. The light in Dalli’s work is sometimes powerful and blinding. It is a purging light that revels in the absence of humankind, although the philosophy of the artist does not allow for the denigration of fellow humans.
Josef Kalleya, the 20th century Maltese artist who is emphatically considered to be one of the masters of Maltese modernism, believed in the apocatastasis at the end of time. Dalli’s ideas are not too far removed from those of his illustrious predecessor. He optimistically believes that the good is a consequence of the bad in life.
Unlike his mentor Rothko, Dalli does not descend into the comfort of pure abstraction or spiritual delivery through the glory of untainted colours. He still marvels at architecture and human endeavour, believing that anything man-made can be beautiful. He firmly declares that humanity redeems itself through creativity.
Dalli’s paintings are like soft whispers, the gentle murmur of a peaceful existence untainted by the sound of heavy machinery or gridlocked traffic. They are unencumbered portals into a sacred place within us, a personal tabernacle of transubstantiated memories and yearnings.
One can only hope that contemporary existence does not do its thing and destroy what, notwithstanding everything, still steadfastly quivers and flickers inside the luckiest among us.
Alex Dalli’s works are on exhibit at the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry, Republic Street, Valletta, until May 30. Opening hours are Monday to Friday from 8am to 5pm.