Art and the uncomfortable truth of light: memory, conflict and renewal

A little more than a year has passed since I curated The Dirge, Matthew Shirfield’s lingering exhibition shaped around the enduring narrative of the Faustian legend. At the time, the show unfolded as a meditation on humanity’s recurring temptation: the pursuit of power or knowledge at the cost of its own moral footing.

Shirfield’s particular works, representing bodies dissolving into emptiness, figures walking in ghostly suspension and the spectral presence of Faustus himself, felt like a lament for a world drifting into spiritual fatigue. What seemed then like a symbolic reflection now reads with startling clarity: a recurring premonition.

In the year since the exhibition, global events have unfolded with an intensity that echoes the storyline of the Faust myth. Across continents, we have witnessed a dangerous willingness to trade ethics for the illusion of dominance. Leaders barter human lives for territorial ambition; corporations turn ecological collapse into profit; societies, overwhelmed by polarisation and digital fragmentation, abandon solidarity for anger and algorithmic tribalism.

Hunter as Prey Eternal by Anthony Catania

The rhetoric of resolution may dominate our screens, but the deeper fractures – social, political, environmental – remain raw and widening. In this unfolding climate, Anthony Catania’s current exhibition Antler Cry deepens this moral terrain through the haunting myth of Actaeon – the hunter whose forbidden act of seeing cost him his own form. Catania’s violent strokes and raw, corporeal surfaces echo the logic of the Faustian bargain itself: the perilous moment when vision becomes transgression and knowledge demands a devastating price. His canvases stand as evidence of that cost, urging us to confront the uncomfortable truths we prefer to keep unseen.

Seen against this backdrop, these collections and exhibitions feel like a cartography of the present moment, mirroring the condition of populations caught in conflict. The imagery of disappearance, of bodies caught between presence and absence, histories erased, truths distorted.

As we move into the Christmas season, with its rituals of light, generosity and communal warmth, there is particular poignancy in revisiting the moral terrain that The Dirge explored. This is a moment traditionally associated with renewal, with the language of peace and goodwill. And yet, peace without acknowledgement becomes sentimental. Renewal without recognition of risks becomes a form of denial. Before celebration, there must be memory.

Against the Common Good by Francisco Goya

Artists have long played the role of witnesses to societal unravelling, and Shirfield’s visual lamentation sits within a profound historical continuum. Nowhere is this lineage clearer than in Francisco Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra – currently exhibited at the Grand Master’s Palace in Valletta.

If the past year has taught us anything, it is that the Faustian bargain is not a myth of the past

Goya’s exquisite etchings confront the viewer with an unflinching record of human cruelty. Shirfield’s work, in a way, emulates elements which are found in Goya’s masterpieces, exposing the abyss into which societies descend when morality collapses. These original prints function simultaneously as historical documents and as prophetic warnings that still appear uncomfortably true even today.

Walpurgis Festa Series by Matthew Shirfield

Shirfield’s Walpurgis series, where figures appear caught in ritualistic festa spectacles of chaos, suggests implicit disintegration, echoing a visual which recalls the violent tableaux of Kara Walker, particularly her searing piece Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something). Walker’s silhouettes, emerging from darkness into stark confrontation, lay bare the mechanisms of domination, dehumanisation and collective guilt. In placing innocence and violence side by side, she forces us to acknowledge how civilisations justify cruelty under the pretext of necessity, righteousness or fear.

Furthermore, Shirfield’s charcoal compositions, with their shifting contrasts and shadowed forms, also evoke the visual dualities found in various other contemporary artists such as William Kentridge. Kentridge’s seminal imagery stages a world in which light and darkness, visibility and concealment, coexist uneasily, revealing how societies mask their deeper fractures beneath the surface of everyday life.

Strange Devotion from The Disasters of War Series by Francisco Goya

His figures move between clarity and obscurity, reflecting the contradictions and hidden brutalities that shape political and historical realities. The interplay of dark and light creates a visual field where form becomes both a revelation and a warning. In this way, Shirfield’s imagery, like Kentridge’s, speaks to the dual nature of contemporary society: what is shown and what is suppressed, what is illuminated and what remains deliberately obscured.

This Christmas, as lights return to our streets and the language of hope resurfaces, we would do well to pause. Not to reject celebration but to deepen it. To recognise the wounds before we speak of peace. To acknowledge suffering before we announce renewal. To remember that behind every ritual of light lies a responsibility to confront the darkness it seeks to dispel.

Because if the past year has taught us anything, it is that the Faustian bargain is not a myth of the past. It is the story we are still writing.