Roots of an island

Gozitan artist Christopher Saliba is back with another exhibition titled "Roots of an Island", the ninth solo event since 2002. The exhibition, showing at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta, consists of around 20 of his latest semi-abstract landscapes. Another exhibition last year was reviewed by Kenneth Wain:

Christopher Saliba’s painting has come a long way since October of last year, 2005 when he exhibited a set of paintings titled ‘Silent Places’ in Gozo. Those paintings were landscapes in the conventional style representing recognisable landscapes in Gozo and Comino. They were followed up in May of this year, 2006, by another exhibition ‘Impressions’ in Malta at Cleland and Souchet where his style continued to be conventional. The brochure for the first exhibition described him as a “passionate landscape painter,” fascinated by his native land but interested not in “mere natural reproductions,” but in creating ‘atmosphere’; as the name of the exhibition implies one of contemplative silence related to the “mysterious and the primordial.” The brochure also described him as a ‘romantic’ and an expressionist, thereby placing him within a particular strand of modernism.

Not much in the artist’s outlook has changed substantially since then. Saliba still sees himself as an expressionist inspired by natural forms, particularly those around him, interested in ‘transcending’ them, in creating ‘atmosphere’, in imbuing them with his own meaning rather than replicating them faithfully on a canvas. What appears to have changed, and radically, in the very few months since May is his style; the landscape painter has turned abstract, a predictable step in his evolution as an artist. What may not have been so predictable is the speed with which this transformation has taken place. But, in fact, the artist has long been familiar with the idiom of abstract expressionism, has obviously studied the works of its main protagonists closely, and at first hand, and has been quietly working away at it for the past two years or so.