July saw the launch of 111 Art Gallery, which took place concurrently with the inauguration of Mark Mallia’s solo exhibition Open Closet on July 13 – an inauspicious date in the books of the superstitious.
Provocation and Mallia is a tautology that many local art lovers have come to accept as a fingerprint of the maverick artist, whose opinions and social media comments may often come across as brash and insensitive.
His unabashedly crass interjections provoke reactions among his captive audience of Facebook followers and he basks in the light of this notoriety.
This collection of paintings and sculptures, that are so thematically diverse, is an adventure ride inside Mallia’s psyche. The sensitivity of the mature artist, now in his 53rd year, sometimes plays second fiddle to an outspoken and irreverent personality. Mallia’s closet has remained wide open to scrutiny for years, with every skeleton that could have hidden in some dark recess of his metaphorical cupboard shoved into the limelight and derided upon, or publicly spurned.
This exorcism has redeemed him of a past full of injustices, lost opportunities, bad decisions and life-changing experiences. His rollercoaster ride into middle age has been rife with pitfalls, yet his resilience has been providential in overcoming most of what has been flung at him.
The association of Mallia with the crow, which can be defined as his alter ego, originates from a trip to Windsor, England. The motif has since developed as a major theme in his oeuvre and its presence does not go unnoticed.
The mischievous creature universally associated with gloom and doom encapsulates a certain Mallia trait. Since time immemorial, the crow has been considered a messenger of sorts. Some mythologies embrace the creature as a divine messenger; others look at it with mistrust, deeming it a harbinger of bad news and even death.
Wiccan tradition and neo-paganism attribute special powers to particular animals known as ‘familiars’, believing that an individual can connect psychically with an animal to form a companionship. Crows are very intelligent birds that can bond with a person whom they believe they can trust.
It has been scientifically demonstrated that this bird can identify a particular human that may have harmed it in the past and categorise them as an enemy to be feared. Crows also communicate with each other, with some ornithologists maintaining that as information is shared, bad experiences of individual members can affect a murder’s migration patterns.
Joseph Beuys is universally considered to be Modernism’s archetypical artist-shaman. One of his most outrageous exploits was his 1974 conceptual performance ‘I Like America and America Likes Me’, in which he locked himself up with a coyote for three consecutive days.
He attempted to befriend the wild animal by trying to achieve a physical and psychic bond with it. The coyote symbolised America’s spirit animal, or its familiar.
Native American tribes endowed it with a dualistic nature, perceiving it to have an ability to transform itself, and to possess an aptitude for being a dastardly mischievous trickster. Beuys’s attempt to establish a connection with the coyote was a shamanistic reaching out to tap into America’s soul.
Representing Europe and its bloodthirsty history of post-Colombian colonisation and population displacements, Beuys instigated some form of catharsis between continents as he tried to tame, understand and befriend the coyote – the representative of the pure spirit of pre-Colombian America.
Pier Paolo Calzolari, one of the exponents of the Arte Povera movement, similarly introduced an albino dog in one of his installations, The Ideal House.
The house would be less than ideal without the aforementioned dog. A dog, cat or any other pet is seen to act as a familiar within a particular household, elevating it to the ‘ideal’ status coined by the Italian artist. In a similar vein, Jean Cocteau had expressed that: “I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little they become its visible soul”. It then follows that the lack of feline presence deprived Cocteau’s house of its familiar, thereby rendering it almost soulless and less than ‘ideal’.
The sensitivity of the mature artist sometimes plays second fiddle to an outspoken and irreverent personality
Similarly, the crow certainly enjoys pride of place in the oeuvre of Mark Mallia. It stands steadfast and almost oblivious to any background human noise.
Acting as Mallia’s familiar, it is a messenger that the artist sends out to monitor and survey his surroundings and bring back news – tales of human misanthropy, political corruption, social injustice, juicy gossip and Poesque tales of ‘mystery and imagination’.
He sometimes portrays it as a human-avian hybrid clad in formal tie and suit. The artist’s personality sometimes metamorphoses into a corvine one of mischief, audacity, insouciance, higher perspective and mystery.
Another series of paintings by Mallia features a red background that seems to act as a statement against the politically-appointed trolls and commentators of the artist’s Facebook posts.
Displays of Mark’s apparent allegiance to one local political party over another have misled his numerous Facebook followers, who have as a result accepted him as one of their own. The incurable blindness of trolls, employed by politicians to brainwash and indoctrinate, deprives them of the ability to make sense of sarcasm when it stares them right in the face.
Mallia thrives on this milieu, laughing at the gullibility of such people who unwittingly serve as fodder for this red-background series of works.
Here, one might be reminded of George Grosz’s disdain for Weimar Germany’s society. His attacks and cruel comments were not spared on the bourgeoisie; the corrupt and morally defunct industrialists and capitalists; the treacherous politicians, their cronies and their empty promises; the clergy and its blindness to depravity; and especially the high echelons of the Prussian army. One can find analogies between Grosz’s New Objectivity and Mallia’s contempt for the deterioration of contemporary Maltese society. The creatures that populate this series of paintings are troll-like in appearance – deformed, shapeless and unpleasant. They seek refuge behind computer screens, brainwashed to churn out hatred along with an assortment of clichéd slogans.
Mallia’s Castles in the Air is a series of black gothic sculptures reminiscent of the Minas Morgul towers in Tolkien’s malevolent land of Mordor. The monstrous towers and the huge cranes that have taken over the Sliema skyline, the shortsightedness and callousness of the Maltese version of progress and the unnatural need to resemble other countries while destroying the unique charm of this tiny island nation stand out like self-inflicted wounds.
Meanwhile, Malta’s own Sauron gleefully looks on. These castles are imaginary status symbols that the money-grabbing developers aspire to as they ride roughshod over good taste.
Theirs is a greedy and insensitive agenda to follow in their bid to become millionaires. Mallia has collected a number of branches from roadsides over the past few months. These amputated limbs form relics of those butchered trees that stood in the way of traffic management. Poppy Field is Mallia’s yearning for a morphine-laced descent into numbness. The Cy Twombly influence merges with Mallia’s palette of earthiness and decay. The rivulet of blood red that traverses this large canvas can be easily misread as a trail of blood than a band of flowers.
Carol Diehl’s observations on Joan Snyder’s Primary Fields exhibition appear relevant here, as similarly Mallia “somehow manages to make paintings about love and beauty (or their absence) that are free of the taint of sentimentality, rendered in the brash brushstrokes and large scale usually reserved for more heroic subjects.
While admittedly these paintings are aggressive, their energy comes not from anger but strength.