The Biennale’s Director, Dr Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, has said that what he really wants to do ‘is create a bridge with the past and the present’. As a result the 2015 and 2017-18 Biennale’s showcased fascinating history of modern sacred art in Malta though the works of Josef Kalleya, Antoine Camilleri, Carmelo Mangion, Esprit Barthet, and Frank Portelli.
Christian Attard has noted that, ‘In an artistic climate dominated by an overbearing Church and a hard-wired insular resistance to new ideas, any form of modern artistic syntax was to take a painfully long time to develop in 20th-century Malta.’ Schembri Bonaci chose the figures of Karmenu Mangion and Joseph Kalleya as symbolic standard-bearers for modern art saying: ‘Karmenu Mangion and Josef Kalleya are two of the most important 'fathers' of Maltese modern art. Both have a strong spiritual connection and a strong modernist idiom and language.’
According to Attard, Kalleya created ‘works in clay of a deeply primeval religious intensity’ and his ‘experimental, expressionistic use of clay, makes him somewhat a sort of a spiritual father to Antoine Camilleri … whose work with clay would equally lead him to give form to profoundly personal themes.’ Dominic Cutajar says that Kalleya, together with Antonio Caruana, ran study sessions in a group called Studio Artistico Industriale Maltese d’Arte Sacra which were attended by most of the Maltese young artists of the time, including Vincent and Willie Apap, Emvin Cremona, Giuseppe Arcidiacono, Anton Inglott, Carmelo Borg Pisani, Esprit Barthet, Emmanuel Borg Gauci and Giorgio Preca.
Attard explains that the opening of the Malta School of Art in 1925, with Edward Caruana Dingli as its first director, would also ‘prove to be the perfect hothouse for the formation of a group of artists who were, very soon, to challenge the old order’: ‘Antoine Camilleri received his initial training there. Likewise did George Fenech … even if during his years the School was run by two of its former students: Vincent Apap (1909-2003) and Emvin Cremona (1919-1987).’ Carmelo Mangion never attended, but in his youth received private tuition from Caruana Dingli.
Schembri Bonaci says: ‘Karmenu Mangion is an incredible tour-de-force in Maltese art: violent expressionist with Fauvist colour; 'savage' but excellent drawing, challenging Cezanne and Rouault; his link between abstract art and Maltese megalithic architecture brings him in the forefront of European modern art. His spirituality permeates in all his works and his religious works are subtle and even subversive. Greatly underestimated, for obvious reasons. An excellent etcher and engraver. Despite his legendary modesty and humility he is a giant in art. No art study, no artist can escape his overpowering 'gaze'.’
Emvin Cremona created “chromatic sprees and feasts for the eye” with his Church commissions. However, Peter Serracino Inglott suggests that, while he ‘did not fail to display imagination and tact in artistic work ranging from abstractions in broken glass to postage stamps and street decorations, his numerous essays in church painting resulted in repeated compromises between his creative flair and popular taste, always bathed in an atmosphere of quasi pre-Raphaelite spirituality.’
Frank Portelli developed a form of cubism, first seen in the narrative painting La Vie, which he called ‘crystallised cubism.’ Kenneth Wain describes this as ‘a cubism of planes not volumes’; ‘prismatic effects which the artist sought to obtain through the subtle use of finely graded and translucent colour tones which produces a glazed effect.’ The evolution of this technique owed something to Portelli’s ‘long enduring fascination with the optical and light effects of stained glass’. Wain notes that each of Portelli’s projects show painstaking research including the ‘extremely original’ altar in 1984 for the parish church of Marsascala or ‘the interior design of virtually a whole church, as was the case with the sanctuary of St Theresa, in B’Kara.’
Cutajar agrees that a ‘clear modern sensibility throbs in the work of such artists as Josef Kalleya (1898-1998), George Preca (1909-1984), Anton Inglott (1915-1945), Emvin Cremona (1919-1986), Frank Portelli (b.1922), Antoine Camilleri (b.1922) and Esprit Barthet (b.1919).’ In fact, he says, ‘the Post-War years in Malta were marked by a truly modern renaissance of the arts. A group of forward-looking artists came together forming an influential pressure group known as the Modern Art Group. Together they forced the Maltese public to take seriously modern aesthetics and succeeded in playing a leading role in the renewal of Maltese art.’
Cutajar argues that Alfred Chircop (b.1933) became the most important Maltese pioneer and that his ‘catharsis is tied to the cosmic transcendentalism popularised in Catholic intellectual circles by Teilhard de Chardin.’ Cutajar says that ‘the harmonious fusion of form and colour’ of his non-figurative art has moved forward with ‘the enrichment of his inner vision’. ‘The correspondence of the intangible with the material is at the core of the latter's thinking, thus injecting the great idealistic message of Hope to the cosmic phenomenon of chaos and ultimate dissolution.’
In more recent years the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale has been the primary focus of contemporary sacred art ‘evolving from the first such event, 'Contemporary Sacred Art in Malta' of 1994, and the subsequent exhibitions entitled 'Contemporary Christian Art', which took place in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2005, as well as other comparable earlier contemporary art exhibitions organised in Malta in the years leading up to 1994.’
‘The 1994 event ambitiously underlined the idea of museums as "depositories housing the results of cultural achievements attained by man's will-power extending itself in all directions that emerge from human intelligence". The 1996 Biennale concentrated on creating "a further development of the Sacred more closely linked with a definite characteristic of our cultural background". Constant Dialogue was the central theme of the 1998 event: "The widespread evaluation of the constant dialogue between the artist and the world around him". For obvious reasons the 2000 exhibition focussed on "the end of the present Millennium ... and the long stretch of innumerable decades and revolving centuries of Christian existence". 2002 and 2005 defined sacred, or spiritual, art as the summit of religious art and emphasised its connection with the artist's "noble ministry".’
Under Schembri Bonaci, the 2015 Biennale expanded upon the various parameters from earlier years. ‘It declared all art to be spiritual, in the sense that creative depiction, actions and events, through their intrinsic character, reflect the individual's relation with reality, and with his or her own existence. Hence such creative acts are necessarily spiritual, independent of their ostensible devoutness, independent of a faith or lack of faith, independent of their allegiance to any particular faith, or to none.’
‘In the second edition, 2017-18, the APS Mdina Biennale explored the multiple manifestations of Mediterranean identity as visualised by past and contemporary art. Artists created site-specific works that investigated the theme and the permanent collection of the Mdina Cathedral Museum.’
The 2020 edition concentrated on digital-video projections and installation art to explore how spirituality and its relationship to the environment can help humankind save its natural heritage, and the role of art and the artist in this debate.
Schembri Bonaci says that: ‘Every edition's theme connects with the theme of the previous one and a continuum is created via a category which unites all, which is spirituality.’ This is so despite his own anti-clerical leanings. ‘Whether I agree with its tenets or not,’ he says, ‘Christianity is very much part of the culture I grew up in, so it will inevitably inform my work.’ Spirituality, however, ‘is not narrowed down to a religious belief, whatever the belief.’ ‘It transcends and unites all, believers and non-believers, and the only unanimous unity is found in having a spiritual bond with our existence.’
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Joseph Fenech - Gloria In Excelsis Deo.
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