The exhibition In Search of Line at the Victor Pasmore Gallery in St Paul Street, Valletta, has quietly been one of the best showcases so far in 2024.
Competing with a heavily saturated art calendar, the show is elegantly exhaustive, giving anyone who is dedicated to Maltese modern art history (or anyone who isn’t) a very full understanding of the quality of production that was turned out during the zeitgeist of the post-war decades.
Its subject – the ‘line’ – is interesting, but secondarily to the breadth of the work itself, despite the curation’s strong focus on its theoretical exploration.
What this persistent curatorial emphasis does, however, is create a gapless exhibition. Not only does the show include a healthy number of exhibits, but it cascades them together seamlessly, making complete sense in both subject and style.
Its catalogue feels similar in scope – a piece of work that has clearly been well considered and made with the goal of standalone quality. It is more experimental than the exhibition but holds the same volume of content and thusly a fortune of quality.
Despite being a Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti project, it makes strides in shedding the expected academic tone that art writing seems eternally locked within locally. It doesn’t always succeed here – the writing is still at times laden with impenetrable language and art-speak. But in its structure and formatting, the catalogue’s tome tone offers something new.
The layout design is, like the exhibition, refined and inventive simultaneously, although the absence of a title along the spine of any publication is always troublesome. But overwhelmingly, the layout works supportively with the text. Its organisation, colour shifts, fold-outs and graphic continuity are never conspicuous or arbitrary.
Its essays are strong, studied and, similarly to the exhibition, a stylish homage to a great period of art in Malta’s history
The catalogue’s content is also well contemplated and fairly exhaustive. Most notably, it is consistently striving to steer away from the obvious. Its downfall is that a reader can, at times, sense that effort – in the surplus of quotations, for example – and that exertion overtakes the rhythm of reading itself. But its essays are strong, studied and, similarly to the exhibition, a stylish homage to a great period of art in Malta’s history.
It moves beyond Malta’s shores of course, following the exhibition’s own latitude. Giulia Privitelli’s essay on Lucio Fontana is nourishingly informative, giving any newcomer to his ‘cuts’ a quick (generally all of the essays maintain a compact word-count) yet deep theoretical tour through what his punctured canvases actually mean.
Richard England’s texts on Victor Pasmore and Basil Spence are, similarly, essays in learned clarity. The catalogue succeeds best here, when offering insight that is incisive, but never boring.
Elsewhere, text delves more directly into the experimental. Sarah Chircop’s introductory text and Michael Zammit’s essay on a ‘Series of Six Figure Studies’ are both language experiments as much as they are commentary/appraisals. These texts move closest to the simulation of the ‘line’. They meander and are self-conscious. The cadence of the book’s reading is set off-beat because of them – which can either be effective or disruptive depending on the reader or the reading mood. Either way, they make this catalogue different.
The editorial integrity of the catalogue shines through its straightforwardness, even if its aim is to spotlight its originality. The progression of chapters is coherent, intuitive and interesting. The trajectory is clear.
The artworks are given the most prominent platform within the book’s pages. Its rejection of standard catalogue entries or linear historical explanations does not spell flimsiness or under-researched content.
If anything, the real experimentation within the catalogue of what art writing can do stood to go beyond the playfulness of the language itself, and could have been even bolder with its conclusions, and – as ever with local art writing – lighter on flattery.
In Search of Line is an art book, not just a catalogue. It will be read, unconnectedly to the shuttering exhibition, for many years as a whole and comprehensive study on the exploration of ‘line’.
In its graphic point-of-view and its editorial confidence, it meets the spirit of the 1973 publication Contemporary Art in Malta, also edited by Richard England, and the 2008 publication, Cross-Currents, edited by Raphael Vella.
In doing so, it joins a small community of art publications that strive to cajole and reinvent the standards of art writing in Malta. For that, and for the breadth of content it holds, In Search of Line packs a substantially, if imperfectly, noble punch.