Venus

To destroy is to create. This is an adage that holds particularly for the 20th century: an era of strife and revolution, of human capability at thermonuclear self-destruction and a way forward to discover the elixir of life with the unravelling of the human genome.

It was an age of dualities during which the planet experienced two world wars, as well as a number of post-war settlements that ushered in some vain hope that lessons had been learnt.

20th-century art was not a linear phenomenon. Isms succeeded and killed each other off. Aesthetics and the concept of beauty were given a run for their lives as human anatomy was deconstructed and reshaped into a barely humanoid form, and still life was ravaged out of its traditional rigidity by the experiments of Braque and Picasso.

The laws of perspective laid out during the Renaissance by Paolo Uccello were dealt a severe blow in the latter decades of the 19th century as Cezanne revolutionised the landscape genre and claimed many 20th century artists as his converts.

The aftermath of World War II was fertile ground for the development of new art movements all over Europe and across the US. Among these, CoBrA – its designation celebrating the fact that member artists hailed primarily from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam – embraced the accidental, and drew inspiration from untrained artists such as children and ostracised people with health mental problems. So-called primitive art from Africa and Oceania provided further stimuli.

Samuel Sultana acknowledges the influence of the protagonists of this mid-20th century movement on his artistic output. It is no coincidence that he recalls a toy hammer as one of his favourite childhood play objects. When he was still a toddler, he would marvel at the freedom and ability it bestowed on him to destroy and create things anew.

The young artist is intrigued by the rituals and almost inexplicable magic of prehistory beneath the millennia of misconceptions and fallacies

Sultana’s move to Bristol, his academic studies and exhibitions abroad, together with his French parentage are all ingredients that imbue the 27-year-old artist’s work with a certain elan and freshness that one finds in the non-ceramic work of Gabriel Caruana. The creatures that populate the paintings of this celebrated Maltese ceramist as well as the works of CoBrA artists including Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Corneille, and especially Constant Nieuwenhuys, have found new forms of representation in Sultana’s oeuvre.

Anubis

The young Franco-Maltese artist admits that he is at the mercy of a whole spectrum of stimuli that aid in the conception and execution of his canvases. Dreams, films, conversations, life experiences and occurrences, the works of other artists: some or all of these can, at some point or another, evoke in Sultana the urge to create.

One can say that living itself is what his art is all about. He seeks balance in apparent opposing dualities which are really two sides of the same coin. In the chaos of conflicting thoughts and emotions, he seeks the harmony and balance of the cosmos. Dreams become portals to the subconscious, which Sultana considers as sources that require tapping into.

This rather surrealistic approach to art creates life forms that are otherworldly. Sultana’s creatures are not idealised horse, elephant or bird stereotypes. They are stunted, mutated, imperfect and timeless as in the cave paintings of Lascaux.

Sultana’s Anubis and Birdman Apparition hint at the ancient Egyptian and Amerindian civilisations respectively. Bird Priest can be interpreted as a self-portrait of the artist as a shaman – the interlocutor who can liaise on our behalf with deities and supernatural creatures, whom he entreats to manifest themselves onto his canvases. His approach is different from that of German artist Joseph Beuys, universally considered as the archetypical artist-shaman, in that Sultana’s search is not for Duchampian found objects – which Beuys converted into reliquary artefacts to serve his own personal religion.

Elephant

The young artist is intrigued by the rituals and almost inexplicable magic of prehistory beneath the millennia of misconceptions and fallacies. Rather like Cy Twombly, he scribbles on his Venus piece in an attempt to define the goddess of love, shorn of any Botticellian concept of ideal and sexualised beauty. Her body parts are indicated in a child-like language that can accept grammatical mistakes as its vernacular, hinting at the rawness of a Basquiat.

The female form is universal and life-sustaining. This is also a primordial Eve complete with red apple and long hair: temptress and harlot, but simultaneously holy as the cosmological mother figure. This is Sultana’s ironic remark on the way male chauvinism still blatantly depicts the female of our species well into the 21st century.

This collection of contradictions, dualities, incongruous statements and improbable balance through lack of harmony is a journey into the world of a young artist with a mature outlook who dreams, surveys, learns and evaluates. His works are monumental and colourful explosions which act as portals that invite us into a primeval, subconscious world of signs and symbols indicative of an exploratory state of being.

The work of Samuel Sultana can be viewed at the artist’s studio. E-mail:  jandmagius@gmail.com for a private appointment.