Joseph Agius reviews Gerald-John Micallef’s 13-painting collection, Thoughtology, a personal diary that spans the artist’s search for expression of abstract concepts via painterly abstraction.

“Thoughtology is the belief that the way we think can have an actual effect on our reality in both a positive and negative way.”

The Last Judgement

This collection of 13 paintings by Gerald-John Micallef offers a glimpse into the psyche of a complex Maltese artist whose work stems from the world of literature, theology, philosophy and psychology. 

Micallef’s academic studies  had exposed him to knowledge which was subject matter for paintings among the years.  Besides this, the artist who is also a priest, studied under tutors of the calibre of Josef Kalleya, undoubtedly one of the masters of Maltese Modernism, and Anton Calleja.

Micallef grew up in a family which was very open to artistic expression.  His mother, cradling the 10-month old Gerald-John in her lap, sat for Raymond Pitre’ in a double portrait that demonstrates the friendship that the renowned artist enjoys with the Micallef family. 

As a young boy, Micallef was drawn to the representational, displaying a precocious aptitude for the painting of religious icons.  Josef Kalleya’s unorthodox philosophy must have prompted the young artist to search for an enlightened truth which is more than skin deep.

Years later, he ditched the representational where he found he could not express himself fully. Thus, he avoided becoming clichéd and overdone.  He eventually found his way through abstraction and is now adamant that he will not have second thoughts and revert back to the representational. 

Being an accomplished musician complements his expression and opens up new vistas.  Similarly, maestro Pawlu Grech, another Maltese artist-musician, had embarked on a fusion between the two art forms in his abstract pieces. 

His academic studies in both fields provided Grech with inspiration that would have been beyond the capabilities of a conventional visual artist. 

Open Sea

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schultze, the German artist otherwise known as Wols, was famous for his brand of lyrical abstraction and drifted towards the French post-Second World War school of Tachisme.  Contemporary with American Abstract Expressionism, Tachisme was a reaction to the more stylised Cubism and boasted a freshness, an somewhat child-like spontaneity and a lack of formal constraint that these new protagonists found in the work of Braque, Picasso and their followers. 

In both Grech’s and Micallef’s oeuvres, there is a measure of Tachiste freedom in the love for biomorphic forms and, in the younger artist’s case, for God’s creation. 

Micallef’s admiration for Malta’s foremost modern ceramist Gabriel Caruana’s determination in his path to abstraction is boundless.  Open Sea might come across as an homage to the Maltese master.  CoBrA inspired colours and forms demonstrate the younger artist’s admiration for his mentor and for what he represents as a stalwart of Maltese Modernism.

He admirably does not fall into the soft clutches of the safe and the decorative

Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead and that the empty cathedrals are His cemeteries had proved to be prophetic as the 20th century then progressed. Countless episodes of destruction and varied attempts at global annihilation forecast a grim picture for the future of humankind. 

In Micallef’s own words, Man made himself god; a god that however lacked any morsel of divinity, hence the mess.  Hades is a colourful composition that splits the canvas into a dark nocturnal heaven and an appealing and colourful Underworld. 

A transient, opalescent Styx silently flows between the two hemispheres. A red spheroid mass of energy could represent Charon and his ferry of souls transported into eternal damnation. The marble-coloured chaotic realm of Hades reminds us of planet Earth and its charms and its humours.  Heaven is a cosmos of a uniform and deep velvety blue. 

One of the laws in German philosopher’s Freidrich Engel’s Dialectics of Nature postulates that there is a code of transformation from quantity into quality and vice versa.  Micallef has so effectively transcribed this into this painting.

Apocalypse, The Last Trumpet and the Last Judgement form a triptych thematically and intricately linked to The Book of Revelation, the epilogue of the New Testament. 

The End of Days, so fondly invoked by the doomsday cults, is the ultimate justice meted out by the Holy Trinity which would single out the eternally damned from the righteous.

This would bring about universal and everlasting harmony.  However, Hell is not driven out of the equation which would be implying that ultimate redemption would be relative and not absolute after all.  Josef Kalleya’s Apokatastasis is a more inclusive theology of eternal salvation.

Micallef has imbued these three abstract canvases with a bevy of symbolic and apocalyptical statements.   Apocalypse suggests that the Tree of Life, or Christ, is steadfast while His followers are clad in pure virginal white, safe and saved from the havoc that threatens menacingly at the roots of the life-giving tree.

There is a downward flow in The Last Trumpet, as the blood red representing Christ antagonises the entropy on the right side of the painting in the form of Azrael, the Angel of Death. 

The red vortex of energy is a divine life force that rips apart the veil of the Temple of Jerusalem, at the moment when the crucified Lamb of God commended Its spirit into the hands of Its Father.  This is represented as such, on the left of the painting by the tattered diaphanous membrane.

The Last Judgement is a contemporary interpretation of Titian’s compositional elements that he used in his much celebrated Assumption of the Virgin in which there is a pronounced division of the pictorial space into three tiers. 

The title of Micallef’s painting would induce one to draw parallels with Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.  However I find that there are more common elements in the Micallef painting with Titian’s masterpiece.

The lower tier represents the dramatically human and terrestrial, the middle part belongs to the celestial as the Virgin ascends aided by a multitude of cherubs and angels while the expectant Heavenly Father occupies the upper segment. 

Hades

The lower tier of Gerald Micallef’s ‘Last Judgement’ similarly evokes the terrestrial drama of an earthbound humanity. Bluish green humanoid accretions might represent the chosen souls anticipating their assumption into a blissful eternity while a cold stark white mass menaces to envelop the cursed into the cold banishment of an eternal hell.

In Micallef’s work, the main focus is the gold abstraction which is Christ the King.  Gold is the symbol of wealth, monarchs and temporal power. 

The Last Judgement acknowledges Christ as the King of all creation and the ultimate judge at the End of Times.  The streaks of blue represent the heavens with their multitudes of saints and angels.  There is an amazing eloquence in this particular painting, a story that is being told through pure abstraction.  In Micallef’s own words “God is abstract after all”.

Thoughtology is a personal diary that spans the last two years of Maltese artist’s search for expression of abstract concepts via painterly abstraction.  He admirably does not fall into the soft clutches of the safe and the decorative.  In abstraction, the 48-year-old artist has found freedom that liberated him from the constraints of representational art. 

He endows his abstract thoughts and musings with shape and colour, giving them a body and also a soul.  Micallef finds particular relevance in abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky’s words: “Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes....Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.”

For private viewings send an e-mail to jandmagius@gmail.com.