The demise of Gabriel Caruana has robbed Malta of one of its master iconic artists and deprived me of a treasured friend. After the departure of an intimate life time companion, the tears of mourning linger on, infiltrate one’s inner essence and serrate the entrails of one’s soul. Consequently, the following lines are written in anguish for to lose a friend is to rent and tear a chapter out of the story of one’s life.

Caruana was the last survivor of the 1960s group of artists who, in the spirit of the zeitgeist of the age and the celebratory tones of the island’s Independence, forged a renaissance of the visual arts. At that time, Caruana made his mark as a novel and revolutionary figure. His exhibition of old truck tyres, prints of oversized bus tickets and other objets-trouve` marked him as a ground-breaking enfant terrible.   Later, as his work focused more on ceramics and sculpture and his output became more accepted, his inspiration was drawn from the optic signals he received from the ambiences and environments of our history-laden island, together with the rich repository of Malta’s pre-historic and Christian symbolism. 

His inquisitive eye was highly influenced by the Mediterranean region’s exuberance, as portrayed locally in the village festas’ medley of colour and allegorical symbolism. 

The prismatic decorations of local dgħajjes and luzzi, together with the hidden colours of their scintillating subaqueous sea-world became his teacher, as did also the local Baroque-haunted church interiors. 

The architecture of the Stone Age era together with its sculpted earth goddess typologies and spiral carvings also served as inspirational data.  Much of Caruana’s ceramic works hinted at a sense of sacrality of the earth, as if to recall the temple builders’ innate understanding of the fecundity and sacredness of the land.

In person, Caruana provided the perfect reflection of his creative activity and work. Passionate, ardent and exuberant, throughout his life he remained very much an anti-conformist character.  Always, he remained true to his creeds and beliefs; a traveller in search of lost arcadias.

His work, was always rebellious against any form of convention. He was a prodigious artist blessed by a Midas touch with a child eye’s vision of things. 

I always found it fascinating to watch Caruana confront his working material, to observe the artist’s hands carve, cut and alloy the basic elements of earth, water, air and fire into a magic alchemy of art was a fascinating experience. 

His involvement with his raw clay material was a passionate love affair.  His unerring hands forged and moulded the argillaceous clay into his desired forms and later as the fires of the kiln fuelled and ignited; an artwork was sired and born.

Later in his life he was fittingly honoured by his country with the Medalja tal-Qadi tar-Repubblika, and a Master of Letters Honoris Causa by the University of Malta.

Even in his mature years, in the eventide of his life, as the hour-glass of life descended, with sails no longer full, when due to corporal limitations he was subjected to his bed or wheelchair, instead of diminishing his work and output he seemed to have been fired with a compelling renewed vitality.  Deprived of his much-loved material, clay, he turned to drawing to overcome his somatic restrictions.

In these works on paper, Caruana seemed to have been reborn again as a magician and conjurer to produce a body of work of artistic and poetic intensity.  Here the artist re-emerged phoenix-like as if in a reincarnation of the seer and shaman that he always was. 

It was as if the ashes of Caruana’s creative furnace energy (the great Italian artist Emilio Vedova once correctly defined Caruana as ‘un volcano’) were regenerated. 

Caruana’s physical restrictions never hindered or diminished his output of work.  On the contrary, his determination and tenacity gave birth to a new redemptive creativity.

Gabriel, the art world salutes you.

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