Appreciation: Ray Pitrè (1940-2024)

Ray passed away peacefully late at night on Wednesday, November 27, just short of his 84th birthday.

Our decades of intimate friendship began in the 1950s when we grew up in the same area of a very different Sliema from how it is today. We hung out together, visited each other’s houses, sat on each other’s doorsteps on summer evenings, walked out on the promenade, and sometimes went to the cinema, together.

Three things were obvious about him then: he hated school, he had an exceptionally powerful grip, and he was shy and awkward with the girls. But his awkwardness ended when he drew, sketched, doodled, moulded clay and plasticine, deftly and confidently.

We swam at the Exiles together and he introduced me to weightlifting. He was interested in athletics and, many years later, took up long-distance jogging. He particularly loved being told a good joke and his friends loved telling them to him, though at the risk of receiving an appreciative thump on the back or squeeze of their hand, for their pains.

That was Ray, big and larger than life in everything that he did, but despite his legendary strength at the time, an incredibly gentle and sensitive giant. Ray who I loved and will continue to love forever, my lifelong friend, my brother. Ray who was to grow into a giant of an artist too. A growth I was privileged to share and follow since those years when he turned the small washroom of his parents’ house in Dingli Street into his first ‘studio’.

Ray, who loved music of all kinds, from opera to pop – and with whom I spent countless hours listening to jazz at my house, marvelling with the technique and the improvisation of musicians like Krupa, Mulligan, Davis, and Mingus.

Ray, who loved poetry but had little time and patience to read it. He would ask me to read poems to him, mine and others, while he painted or sculpted in the washroom. We chatted about the poems and the work he would be engaged with – or we were content to be silent.

His art was self-taught, though his grandfather was a landscape painter, which had its pros and cons. The cons were that without a teacher, he learnt his craft the long and hard way, excellent learner though he was. The pros were the freedom he had to create his own experimental, intuitive, path without a teacher’s interference or influence. His art remained that way for life, free and unshackled; he followed his own nose.

At the same time, it was knowledgeable of art history and contemporary currents which, again, he researched for himself mainly from art magazines and publications – hence our frequent visits to the British Council library in Valletta in our teens. I learnt about art with him. And I like to think that our long conversations were as beneficial to him as they were to me.

Less known about him is his voracious love for literature, particularly later in life, and that he wrote poetry, all of it still unpublished, and an experimental prose work, inspired by Joyce, predestined to remain unfinished.

The 1960s were cathartic years for him, as a man and an artist. In 1961, jobless and experiencing existential crisis, he entered a short-lived novitiate with the Capuchin Friars in Gozo. Afterwards, in 1963, pressed to earn a living, he became a police constable. And shortly afterwards, in 1965, he married the sadly departed Franca and they moved into a tiny apartment in New Street, Sliema.

The wash-house and roof again became his studio. Times were particularly difficult for him then, but that was when his art matured. He produced multi-dimensional experimental works, unique pop kinetic constructions, using collage techniques and diverse unconventional media; chicken-wire, hardboard, metal, wrought iron, and various found object, inspired by Calder and Soto mainly, and by Duchamp.

In this extraordinarily energetic period of raw creativity in the 1960s were born the seminal elements of his future work: drama, dynamism and shock. Unfortunately, those constructions are irretrievably lost now.

But in 1963 he also produced the first of his series of works titled The Scream, like Munch’s famous paintings, but otherwise very different in content and style. Ray’s is not, like Munch’s, a scream running through nature, but one produced by the forceful ejection from the protection of the maternal womb. This is the scream that echoed through his life – and through his dark, difficult, bizarre, Goyaesque works; his Triumph of Deaths, Beheadings, dissected, splayed, anatomies and more.  That underwent various variations, from the narrowing to a vaginal slit to the veritable screams of the mad, the skulls of the dead.

The first personal exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts that brought him the public acclaim he richly deserved only came after 15 incredibly hard years, in 1976. It sold out, the commissions came, and he finally had the large studio he wanted in Swieqi, to produce paintings and sculptural works on the scale he had dreamt of since his youth. He generously invited younger, upcoming artists who he also mentored to share it with him.

In 1999, he represented Malta in the Venice Biennale with two magnificent Guerriero sculptures. Meanwhile, he became the country’s leading portrait painter. In 2000, he was awarded the membership of the National Order of Merit of the Republic. Unique, prolific, powerful, and humble; a great artist in every respect, he deserves international recognition.

Ray, in 1962, you wrote:

“Mother placed a pebble on my heart

the moment I was born.

All those pebbles on the beach

tell me I am not alone.”

And you weren’t alone. You had numerous friends and a family, Franca, Daniele, Cinzia, and your grandchildren, who were devoted to you, as you were to them. You shall continue to live forever in all our memories. And your spirit will be with us always in the wonderful legacy you have left us with, which is your art.