‘Bodies II’ revisits the collaboration between Jesmond Vassallo, Robert Zahra and Gilbert Calleja in exploring the human figure. Three artists, each with a markedly different eye, fill the Auberge d’Italie’s graceful halls with visions of flesh and frailty in a variety of media.

The wandering humans in Vassallo’s pictures and the passionate, reconstituted canvases by Zahra give way to the inevitability of Calleja’s ghostly images- Peter Farrugia

In Vassallo’s paintings the body occupies very social spaces. Inhabiting a studio world, they are at once the focus of attention and its periphery. We watch the artist at play, enjoying the process of production. Especially successful are his etchings – rendered with a fine hand, they capture isolated moments in delicate detail.

Meanwhile, Zahra seems intent on exploiting the body, expressing a thing of ligaments and tendons and exploded muscle. One has the disconcerting impression of wandering around a butcher’s shop in a red light district.

Text encroaches on images, colour is aggressive, limbs are monumental. The sensuous unravell-ing of flesh exposes a nimble ma-trix of bone and marrow. His large paintings treat themes that run the gamut from taboo aban-don through to the most formal stylisation.

While I had previous experience of the above artists’ work, this was the first time I’d seen any of Calleja’s paintings. A familiarity with his photographs was a good point of departure in understanding the smokey, atmospheric boards he contributes to the exhibition.

Calleja has created a spectral ‘rotting space’, a place where the poetic body dissolves into alchemical inconsistency. The wandering humans in Vassallo’s pictures and the passionate, reconstituted canvases by Zahra give way to the inevitability of Calleja’s ghostly images – bodies without a body, at once formed, deformed and departed in a single image.

Corpulent epiphanies; the gross materiality of paint daubs and thick slashes; dripping bodily fluids; physicality in decay.

Figures twist like Hijikata and contort like Goloborodko, all the while flashing Rabelaisian derrières with impunity. Faced by the Calleja paintings, viewers could spend all their time tracing the amorphous lines emerging through a haze of paint.

‘Bodies II’ is concerned with exposing the body “as it is: false, dislocated, suffering”. By rejecting consensual ideas of beauty, the exhibition necessarily touches upon violence.

Conventional perspectives that are upheld in some paintings are thoroughly rejected by others (most radically between Vassallo and Calleja), and the conflicting attitudes of these three painters comes out so clearly that, without wanting to, we feel drawn into dialogue.

We are invited to retrieve the ‘true body’, what critic Ichikawa Miyabi called “the body that has been robbed”. Viewers are exposed to metaphorical representations of the sloughed skins we wear every day, approved by society and strung up for inspection and ultimate judgement.

The body Calleja creates stands as a ‘corpse’, a vessel to be filled by potentialities beyond the scope of rigid socialisation and freed from the dictatorial control of individual consciousness. The painted body is suspended in extreme crisis, undergoing a painful separation from its habitual mode of being, into a state of non-objectification.

The brute primitivism we see here has always been a basic element of avant-garde art but we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking of it as a sophisticated yearning for simplicity, or a childish means to stylistic expression. Rather, we are encouraged to enter a mythical world in which the artist has free reign to access fundamental realities and disclose common truths of the human psyche.

All three artists seem to believe that it is such a state of restoration that this emptied body can make possible, reconstituting its anatomy from a space where past and present, dream and reality, life and death are metamorphosed into something quite startling and new.

We are confronted by the struggle – but what this transformation must mean, beyond a world of paint on canvas, is ultimately up to us.

Bodies II, Auberge d’Italie, Valletta is open till November 3.