6 minute read
LOCAL The loud and proud of Maltese culture captured in vibrant watercolours
from Artpaper. #19
by Artpaper
News / Exhibtion / Debbie Caruana Dingli
September - October 2022
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MALTA
CHARLENE VELLA
US MALTESE
For anyone passionate about their art or craft, a long stretch of time away from that art form feels like an eternity, fingers starting to itch to create. That absence proves how important their art is to them, and that the urge to create is utterly pure and strong, and very much a necessity. This was very much the case for Debbie Caruana Dingli and the creation of the present collection of watercolours.
Debbie Caruana Dingli’s first solo exhibition was held in 1985 and she has not stopped painting or exhibiting her work since, having exhibited her work in Malta and internationally also in collective exhibitions. One of her self-portraits dating to 1985 is exhibited at Malta’s National Fine Arts Museum in . Valletta, MUZA, and she was the 23rd artist selected for Bank of Valletta’s retrospective exhibition in 2015, the first female to have a retrospective exhibition dedicated to her artistic career.
Caruana Dingli is a prolific and prominent exponent of contemporary art in Malta being especially relevant for her sensitivity to socio-political issues of which she is vociferous, even through her art. She, however, also focuses on her own reality, as was the case with her solo exhibition ‘Facing Myself’ held in 2018 after a car accident that took place in 2016.
The starting point for this present collection stemmed from doodles that were created very naturally and unwittingly by Caruana Dingli at a worrying time. These doodles, executed with a biro and paper that were easily available to her, were a form of release, a release from a particularly stressful moment from which Debbie Caruana Dingli needed to escape, even if fleetingly.
Selfie
The Communion Procession Debbie Caruana Dingli later came to realise that amongst these doodles there emerged a very strong Maltese element; this was the start of her next project and the theme of her next solo exhibition, her last one being a large collection of oil paintings on an overlooked aspect of motherhood held in Valletta between April and May 2021 titled ‘Nothing Really Matters’.
And therefore, this exhibition of watercolours executed in the last few months titled ‘The Cappuccino Brigade’ being held at The Phoenicia Malta’s Palm Court Lounge and curated by Dr Charlene Vella, is Debbie Caruana Dingli’s ninth solo exhibition and each painting is based on her observations of us, the native Maltese population.
Her talent for painting is indisputable. She is an astute portraitist and renowned watercolorist, Caruana Dingli also reveals her keen sense of observation in her quirky, clever and witty cartoon-like paintings that share traits that are unique to Caruana Dingli.
Each of her paintings tells a story in a simple and effective way. They are, of course, exaggerations of reality with amplified features and gestures, and which are very much based on actuality. What comes across is what to her and many of us Maltese, is a truly Maltese identity, warts and all, sometimes literally.
The paintings are executed with fluid wet-on-wet or alla prima watercolour technique that is very unforgiving, above which are multiple drawn lines in sections of the composition which focus our attention on the story being told. These lines in ink reveal the flurry of activity with which these paintings were executed, with Caruana Dingli being at that moment completely lost in her work.
She employs a vibrant palette for these compositions which goes very well with the theme of the Maltese who can be very loud and proud: just look at the title piece of the exhibition. This is not to say that there aren’t more sombre and poignant paintings included in this collection, such as The Wedding Photo.
There is bound to be something that we, Maltese, will associate with, giggle or even laugh at, and for foreigners to get to know us colourful Maltese better.
Debbie Caruana Dingli’s exhibition ‘The Cappuccino Brigade’ will be open throughout the month of September at The Palm Court Lounge, The Phoenicia Malta.
Review /Malta / Exhibition
September - October 2022
MALTA
VINCE BRIFFA
Photos: Etienne Farrell #KitzKlikz A s I write this essay on a extremely hot afternoon in July of 2022, the general feeling in Malta is similar to the one in most of the countries around the world; that of business as usual. The everyday seems unhampered by the ghostly memories of the months spent in mandatory lockdown, an absurd and apprehensive reality that was brought about by the strong clasp of a virus whose presence we have now learnt to incorporate in our day-to-day. Still, Malta is experiencing yet another spike in confirmed COVID-19 pandemic cases, the numbers of which have now exceeded a hundred and eleven thousand1 since those first reported at the beginning of March of 2020, bringing with them a death toll of over seven hundred and eighty people to date. At present, Malta has the highest virus positivity rate in the EU, at more than 40%2. Such information, which used to be somewhat worrying only months ago, has become just another unheeding statistic which wades in the overflow of daily information coming our way. Today, we have adjusted pretty well to living in two parallel realities, where we both wear and don’t wear a protective mask, with such a decision at times dictated by the requisites of place and circumstance. However, a totally unconnected consideration has become a key player in the decision-making process of mask-wearing and needs to be factored into the analysis of such an important act. As society continually shapes us and conditions the way we view our face and body image, the decision of wearing a mask or not is also swayed by our individual sense of perceptive aesthetics, or rather, on how we prefer others to perceive our face; factually or open to imagination, real or perceived. Scientific studies in psychology have shown that in the case of vision, a phenomenon termed Amodal Completion3 influences such a decision and skews one into deciding to protect the face to conform to a perceived aesthetic rather than to observe proven scientific procedure. According to the SAGE Encyclopedia of Perception, Amodal Perception is the perception of information that is common or redundant across multiple senses (e.g., auditory, visual, tactile). Amodal information includes changes along three basic parameters of stimulation—time, space, and intensity.4
Therefore, it follows that our perceptual system is able to represent, or better imagine, those parts of the person (object or scene) that we do not see, and therefore in the case of a masked person, the person’s whole face is completed amodally, as informed by the viewer’s perceptive baggage. This phenomenon acts at the threshold of fact and fabrication and is in many ways similar to the central space of artistic encounter, a liminal space for meaning-making between the artist and the viewer and mediated through the artwork.
Since such processes rely on two entities for meaning-making to happen, interaction is not only dependent on the artist creating the perfect space for dialogue, but also on the activation of such dialogue by the viewer’s action. Therefore, mediation is really their prerogative. Without such activity in-between the
1World Health Organisation, Country Statistics, https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/mt 2Times of Malta, 20 July, 2022, https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/maltas-covid-19-death-rate-highest-eu.969412 3Bence Nanay, The Importance of Amodal Completion in Everyday Perception, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6083800/ 4Sage Reference, Encyclopedia of Perception, https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/perception/n18.xml
