So much of memory is defined by the landscapes in which we have lived. We imbue these physical spaces with emotion and a sense of time past, and we too are marked by the same conditions that define the contours and precipices of our surroundings.

As subsequent generations come and go, roads are carved into the hillsides, tunnels dug into the earth, monuments erected and dismantled, homes are built and filled with families and then fall into silent emptiness once more.

Arja Nukarinen Callus's paintings offer a highly personal insight into the artist's charged relationship with the various landscapes in which she finds herself.

The exhibition is being held between April 5 and 25 at the Malta Society of Arts, 219, Republic Street, Valletta.

Virrat 2018.Virrat 2018.

Of Finnish origin, though having long settled in Malta, Callus oscillates between depicting the very different landscapes of her native Nordic homeland and adopted Mediterranean surroundings, reconciling through paint two otherwise diametrically opposed environments.

In doing so, she also extrapolates surprising connections between places that have most defined her memories, forming a dialogue between two otherwise disparate sources that uncovers many aspects of each that could otherwise have been easily overlooked.

Callus's winter landscapes generally convey the wintery chill of a snowbound Finland through a highly effective economy of means.

Arja Nukarinen-CallusArja Nukarinen-Callus

A few prosaic brushstrokes may be all that is needed to outline the reflection of a copse of barren trees upon a frozen pond, for example, all dark texture devoid of life and the blinding whiteness of newly settled snow.

It may not describe the features of the landscape in forensic detail, but the artist's emotive brushwork evokes the 'truth' of that desolate place – the resilience of the trees, the stillness of the frozen earth and the sense of new life yet to come - better than any conventional, picture-postcard view ever could.

In other works, the intense radiance of the Mediterranean is sublimated through the further simplification of colour and form in increasingly serene compositions.

Some of the artist's Maltese scenes tend towards a sense of pure abstraction, perhaps reflecting the sublime interplay of the evening light as it bounces off the sea at the end of a long summer's day.

For those familiar with the local landscape, you cannot help but recognise the characteristic markers that help define it as essentially Maltese - the honey-coloured stone, crumbling walls and the simple, function-oriented architectural facets of our few remaining rural dwellings.

The artist is recording a world in a state of rapid flux, as 'development' and 'progress' quickly demolish what little connection we have left with our natural surroundings into oblivion.

By doing so, the artist charges her compositions with a sense of urgency, a need to claim witness to the world that was before it is irrevocably changed. Her compositions seem to coalescence in an merging of substance and emotion, sometimes outright joyful, sometimes more pensive, if not a touch melancholy.

In doing so, they recall the paintings of the French Post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard, who similarly used strong colour to reflect both his surroundings as well as indicate his inner feelings, rendering the private and the domestic universal through a harmonious appeal to the senses.

Some of the more seemingly minimal compositions even suggest a move towards the radical modernism and concentration on the material qualities of paint extolled by painters of the Art Informel movement. "Virrat, Finland", exhibited here, retains the same dynamic energy that undercuts the work of the German artists Emil Schumacher and Ernst Wilhelm Nay, for example, which was similarly derived from a sustained study of the landscape and the interplay between different colours.

In other works, I am struck by the connections raised to the work of masters of the past. The unusually narrow vertical format of "Mellieħa" reminds us of Joseph-Baptiste-Camille Corot's four similarly-shaped panels illustrating the effect of the changing light upon the landscape at four different times of day. The bleached-out, sombre palette evident in other works recalls the bleak scenes of human folly and natural disasters portrayed in some of Francisco Goya's later works.

One painting exhibited here (Mtarfa) depicts a landscape reduced to its very most basic principles, a mysteriously blank horizon stretching away into profound darkness. This is almost a depiction of the inner landscape of the soul, more of an emotional state than a topographical space.

It calls to mind not only Goya's eternally beguiling painting of an ambitious creature peeping over the ridge of an equally vacant landscape (one of the infamous 'Black paintings' the artist, deaf and disillusioned,painted directly upon the walls of his house in his old age) but also the Romantic yearnings of Caspar David Friedrich's “Monk by the Sea” and Mark Rothko's “Black on Gray”, the logical endpoint of painting at which form and colour are totally reduced to their most base essentials.

It is testament to Callus's inherent skill and creative scope that her work is able to straddle such a wise variety of influences and touchstones, and yet still feel so entirely individual, unique and heart-felt.

With great emotional generosity, the artist constructs a deep rumination on the spaces we move through, and our place within them. In doing so, she reminds us of those urges, fears, hopes and joys which we so often project upon the world around us only, upon further reflection, to find that the greater answers lie deep within ourselves.

George Micallef Eynaud is a London-based researcher, writer and digital archivist 

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.