The word ‘anthropos’ besides being Greek for ‘man’, defines a creature that looks up and walks with its head held up. This sets Man apart from other species that are often brutalised and exploited by Man through a distorted measure of biblical self-entitlement.

The term carries a haughty, self-serving dimension. Man is intuitive and self-aware, which may or may not be true of other animals.

He is capable of transcending and reforming himself, through art and spirituality.

However, he is also very proficient at self-destruction as evidenced by wars, struggles and playing at being god.

Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung found relevance in Gnostic religious imagery and archetypical motifs. Kabbalah, esoteric and Jewish too, is also replete with symbolic imagery amid notions of secret knowledge via the unwritten, divine communication that similarly, resulted in a gnosis (knowledge) that is the realm of the chosen few. The figure of the Anthropos as central to both traditions, i.e, Gnosticism and the Kabbalah.

The exhibition, Anthropos, investigates anthropocentric themes through the work of three artists. Mario Abela and Victor Agius are Gozitan, while Tony Briffa is a Maltese ceramist who emigrated to Denmark two decades ago.

Man (anthropos) is currently at significant crossroad – the traditional existential questions have been replaced by more urgent contemporary ones such as what lies ahead in the aftermath of such pandemic turmoil.

Will humanity learn from this humbling reality check? Is it nature telling us that one little microbe can bring us down to our knees, notwithstanding our vain ambitions of grandeur?

Will we ever, as a species, walk again with our head held high?

Mother – Victor Agius. Right: Victor Agius.Mother – Victor Agius. Right: Victor Agius.

Victor Agius and the exploration of the primitive

Local soil, sand, roots of plants and clay are staples in the general oeuvre of Victor Agius (b. 1982). He explores our country’s Temple Period and the importance of Mother Earth’s products in the life and the artistic expression of these societies. The artist kneads these natural materials, which conceal and nourish, into sculptures that are like eruptions of magna from a pregnant Mother Earth.

Ritual – Victor AgiusRitual – Victor Agius

The artist does not intend to create vessels as evocations of past cultures. His interest lies deeply in the roots of the creative process itself, the endemic qualities of the materials, in a ‘gnosis’ of physical, chemical and biological information. The eruption of volcanoes and the ejaculation of magma are manifestations of a planet still in a state of flux, natural cycles and entropy, properties which the artist continuously investigates. 

Agius agglutinates his sculptures in Lucio Fontana-like materic conglomerations, pummelling and teasing volumes and forms out of mounds of malleable clay. The Gozitan artist thus explores the relationship between anthropos and terra, man and earth, specifically clay.

Blue clay constitutes one of our country’s five geological strata. It is composed of fine lime grains and a mineral known as kaolinite, sediments left by ancient lakes, rivers and volcanic ash. It stands as a witness to the empirical origins of these islands, many millions of years ago. Agius has always been interested in what essentially defines this mass of land, which we often arrogantly claim as our own, to irreverently exploit it out of its few natural resources. 

The sculptor, emulating the artisans of the societies that peopled these islands during Malta’s Temple period, lovingly manipulates the properties of this resource, blue clay, to create a sculpture like ‘Mother’. The title is full of emblematic and symbolic relevance. Notwithstanding its phallic quality, Agius’ creation is derived from clay, a product of our Mother Earth, indeed of our own cliffs. The fissures that crisscross the sculpture are reminiscent of a parched earth lacking moisture. One almost expects the frail surface of this husk to fall apart at its seams.

Ritual integrates Agius’ philosophy of his general oeuvre which is a multidisciplinary one that explores prehistory to find solutions for anthropological concerns. He is a performance artist who finds expression in the ritualistic dimension of the artistic statement. In this sculpture, ash, fire and earth are represented by the blackened clay, the red glaze and the naked terracotta respectively. The artist, as a creative shaman, replicates this cycle of nature which is repeated in the creative ritual.

Mario AbelaMario Abela

Mario Abela’s Notes from the Anthropocene

The Doctor – Mario AbelaThe Doctor – Mario Abela

Mario Abela’s (b. 1983) large canvases, which are part of his collection titled Notes from the Anthropocene, draw on the artist’s interest in a purported geological age coinciding with the devastating anthropogenic impact on the environment. The consequential deterioration has been brought about by human activity that has caused biomass extinction, poisoned the oceans, instigated climate change and altered the composition of the atmosphere. These are some of this epoch’s characteristics. 

The term, Anthropocene (the epoch of man), has been coined by Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, “For the first time in history, geologists are now dating an epoch in the present tense, studying contemporary, still functioning, infrastructures as fossils, studying the constituent elements of our civilisation the way they once studied the remains of a long-vanished life form” (quoting from Glenn Dyer’s and Stephanie Wakefield’s Notes from the Anthropocene #1).

The Anthropocene is progressively gaining more sinister layers to its stratigraphy

The title of Abela’s collection of paintings suggests an exercise in observation, a pictorial diary that focuses on episodes in this ‘unofficial’ epoch of geological time whose point of origin is very blurred. Some experts claim that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is its origin’s defining point. Others ascribe the point of departure to 1945 when the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, resulting in radioactive fallout, thereafter gauged in soil samples all around the world. This added an important stratigraphically documented and geological dimension to one of the lowest nadirs of human activity.

The Hybrid – Mario AbelaThe Hybrid – Mario Abela

Abela’s large canvases merge different elements into a homogenous tapestry of memories that mutually relate, straddling the border between representation and abstraction. The technique, which intriguingly fills all negative space, evokes the work of German artists Markus Lüpertz and Albert Oehlen, as well as the ouevre of certain artists of the New Leipzig School.  In The Hybrid, the artist integrates the body of a canine, perched on a low plinth, with an amorphous mass amid a deceptively pristine landscape, lush with flora.

This may be a comment on genetic experimentation in an age where the creation of a chimera, the fantastical creature of Greek mythology, is within the reach of research geneticists. Viable embryos of human/simian chimeras have been manipulated into existence in April of this year, following fruitful attempts at other trans-species recombinations of genes. 

The Anthropocene is progressively gaining more sinister layers to its stratigraphy. The Doctor evokes the technique of collage, integrating humanoid and the pop elements of a jacket and white socks, together with menacing avian ones, thereby creating another chimeric Max Ernst-like mythological creature from this epoch.

Tony BriffaTony Briffa

Tony Briffa’s  playful, whimsical sculptures

Recollection – Tony BriffaRecollection – Tony Briffa

Having emigrated to Denmark about 20 years ago, Briffa (b. 1959) maintains a connection with our country’s Megalithic legacy. His sculpture Altar evokes three dolmen and a mensa. Upon the latter, the artist has imprinted an all-observing realistic ‘eye of Horus’. This, together with the numerological relevance of the number three inscribed all over the sculpture, adds to the puzzle to be deciphered. The Anthropocene troubles the ceramist as well, especially as his country of origin seems to be hellbent on destroying its identity, although the artist agrees that Mankind’s tendency at self-destruction is a global one.

The late Gabriel Caruana, the father of Maltese 20th ceramics, was Briffa’s mentor and tutor at art school.  The older artist encouraged his young student to persevere and develop the theme of Mother Earth so prevalent in the megalithic societies of this archipelago, symbols and spirals included, as one of Briffa’s prominent artistic concepts. For the ceramist, Mother Earth represents Mother Nature, the life-giving source that every human on this planet should cherish, rather than exploit and throw away.

Passju – Tony BriffaPassju – Tony Briffa

Briffa’s Recollection evokes the playfulness of the number slide puzzle, so common among schoolchildren in the pre-internet age. This piece, as its title indicates, works on many levels. The nine tiles suggest a jigsaw puzzle that defies reassembly into a recognisable motif. There is no vacant tile space to move the pieces around, adding a claustrophobic unsolvable dimension to the pictorial riddle. The clues are mostly anthropocentric, and the artist invites us to decipher possible solutions in his sea of recollection. Rekindling of memories is not a linear enterprise, times juxtaposes these flickers and recombines them into surreal narratives.

Passju is another take on Briffa’s childhood memories as he reinterprets the old game that the children use to trace on the tarmac of streets, with chalk probably pilfered from classrooms. The pattern of criss-crosses and geometrical shapes delineating nine segments had to be skillfully manoeuvred by the nimble kid while obeying a number of rules. Nine is a number that seems to subliminally recur in these games of old, a language of pure exhilaration that we have lost growing up. One is reminded of Spanish artist’s Antoni Tàpies’ vernacular of linear calligraphies, cross-like motifs and cryptic messages.  Anthropos attempts to bring together three different artistic perspectives at a contradictory time in a godforsaken 21st century; a particular time in which we are still rationalising the pandemic and debating whether it can be acknowledged as a lesson learnt or a lost opportunity for change on a planetary level. The exhibition is an exercise in stratigraphy, by peeling away layers to fathom out a meaning and maybe advocate change in this structureless epoch.

Anthropos, hosted at Arthall of 8, Triq Agius de Soldanis, Victoria, is curated by Marta Obiols Fornell. It runs until May 30. Please check the gallery’s Facebook page for opening hours. COVID-19 restrictions apply.

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