A Life in Line

The Sketched Journey of Josef Kalleya (1898–1998)

Nikki Petroni sketches out Kalleya’s theo-philosophical and artistic journey through four (non-linear) chapters orbiting the primordial gesture of drawing a line

Josef Kalleya (1898–1998) was one of Malta’s foremost modernist artists. The spiritual depth and aesthetic novelty of his artistic language meant that his life was fraught with challenges and misgivings.

It was only at age seventy-eight, in 1976, that the artist was granted his first large solo exhibition, preceded by two other smaller exhibitions in 1974 and 1975. Throughout his life, Kalleya mentored and conversed with past artists, writers, and thinkers in his works, but most especially in the thousands of sketches and drawings that have been unearthed in the past five or so years.

The sketchbooks must be perceived as Kalleya’s mind, body, and soul. From the break of dawn, he would begin to release thoughts, his internal ‘torment’, onto paper. These morning sessions would take place in a quiet household, since Kalleya’s studio was attached to the family home, before any of his children or his wife, Elsa, awoke. In the subsequent hours, he would resume work on his sculptures, creating and destroying at the speed of a sudden turn of the head. The sketchbooks would accompany Kalleya on his armchair and even in bed prior to his hours of sleep.

Dr Nikki Petroni completed a Ph.D. in Maltese modern art at the University of Malta under the supervision of Prof. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci. Nikki is a visiting lecturer in modern and contemporary art at the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Malta and is Education and Development Executive at Arts Council Malta. She is part of the curatorial committee of the APS Mdina Contemporary Art Biennale and was Coordinator of the Strada Stretta Concept and Project Manager for the 2022 Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

The smaller sketchbooks would be his companions when exiting the house and his studio. A night would often provide more than enough time for him to fill each page, back and front, of the bound books. Kalleya would sketch swiftly and with immediacy, in a manner that demonstrated the urgency of his preoccupation with the spiritual, cosmological, and existential. The ideas would be well-formed in his head prior to being translated into the sketches. These were nevertheless thoughts filled with ‘uncertainty’,1 as the artist himself expressed it.

Studies on Kalleya’s work have gradually surfaced across the past two decades. However, the profundity of his artistic-philosophical-mystical world has only recently surfaced in art historical scholarship with the work of Prof. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, who took up the gargantuan task of deciphering the artist’s incomprehensible symbolical-hieroglyphical lines and marks. Within Schembri Bonaci’s volumes on Kalleya are multi-layers of thought that not only befit Kalleya’s strength, but also participate in the poetic aesthetic dialogue pursued by the Maltese artist. Kalleya engaged with the thoughts and doubts of his predecessors, his chosen four Grandi Pensatori—Origen, Dante Alighieri, John Milton, and Giovanni Papini—in a way that not only kept their memory alive, but which also continued to add to and debate a repository of knowledge (Fig. 2).

Thus, Schembri Bonaci enters as the next member of the infinite conversation, with his role being that of making the various threads in Kalleya’s tapestry perceptible to the reader by unravelling them only to once again weave an image with greater clarity and understanding. Due to this, one gets to experience Kalleya as well as know him. Such an achievement, amongst others, is the reason that Schembri Bonaci’s research has become inextricably bound to Kalleya’s own work.

Kalleya’s life is reminiscent of an epic journey replete with struggles, tests, riddles, evil detractors, maidens, spiritual enlightenment, and, most importantly, love. All of these are ‘documented’ in his sketchbooks. Hence, this article explores certain aspects of Kalleya’s work via Schembri Bonaci’s own thought and that of two of Kalleya’s contemporaries, whilst attempting to be a journey in and of it itself, travelling through four scenes: the artist’s studio, outer space, prehistoric caves, the afterlife, arriving back at his Blata l-Bajda studio.