Emvin Cremona’s radical turn to materiality

The recent exhibition Emvin Cremona: The Glass Collage at the Victor Pasmore Gallery offered the public a rare opportunity to encounter this brief yet radical episode in Emvin Cremona’s artistic career – a body of work that stands apart for its bold engagement with abstraction and unconventional materials at the turn of the 1970s.

While these works mark a decisive departure from Cremona’s better-known output as Malta’s foremost ecclesiastical artist, they are far from being mere curiosities. They embrace a spirit of experimentation that feels both unexpected and urgent.

A pivotal moment in Cremona’s career – and indeed in understanding what he came to regard as the most authentic expression of his artistic identity – occurred with his participation in the 29th Venice Biennale in 1958.

It was there that he encountered the work of artists such as Alberto Burri, whose radical use of unconventional materials and process-driven methods left a profound and lasting impression on him.

This encounter functioned as a kind of epiphany: a moment of sudden, revelatory clarity in which Cremona grasped the potential of an art based on an improvisatory methodology and a highly gestural technique.

Cremona’s Glass Collages, produced over a brief period between the late 1960s and early 1970s, represent his boldest engagement with modernist ideas.

His impasto works of the same period already demonstrated a pronounced interest in textural experimentation; yet it was in the Glass Collages that he fully disengaged from the obligation to represent nature, prioritising instead the expressive autonomy of the medium.

Privileging materiality over representation, surface over illusion, and process over narrative, the Glass Collages align with post-war European artistic currents – particularly those of Burri, whose Catrami, Sacchi, Combustioni and Cretti series treated the autonomy of materials as the source of meaning. 

Like Burri, Cremona transformed everyday materials – in his case, shattered glass rather than burlap or scorched plastic – into sites of aesthetic reflection. In both cases, the fractures, ruptures and scars in the material reflect a post-war sensibility that recognised fragmentation as the very condition of modernity.

Emvin Cremona in his studio. Photo courtesy of the Cremona Family Archives

With Burri, Cremona shares a deep engagement with the control of the unforeseen: the fracture of matter happens by chance but both artists direct this fracture towards aesthetic resolution. It is a choreography of chance and control, an equilibrium forged from the unpredictable. Through this creative method, both Burri and Cremona create meaning through the inherent immanence of the materials themselves.

Placed in dialogue with Burri, Cremona’s Glass Collages thus emerge as a continuum of this material philosophy – an intuitive way of conceiving the world through matter, attuned to the evolving languages of European modernism.

Indeed, Cremona’s turn to glass, tar, sand, rope and gravel reflects a deliberate embrace of humble, abject materials as vehicles for artistic inquiry.

However, the cultural contexts could not have been more different. Burri’s works found validation within the Italian and European art worlds; Cremona’s remained misunderstood, sidelined by a cultural infrastructure ill-equipped to support such radical departures.

His experiments unfolded in solitude, almost furtively undertaken as both personal necessity and artistic defiance.

Thus, while Burri’s practice was critically absorbed within broader European movements – Art Informel, Arte Povera and the wider discourses of post-war reconstruction and existential inquiry – Cremona’s experiments unfolded in a cultural vacuum. Both artists sought to strip art of its descriptive function, moving beyond figuration to confront matter itself. Yet one was canonised, the other marginalised.

In Malta, abstraction remained alien to the expectations of patrons, institutions and audiences, who continued to demand clear iconography, religious devotion or nationalist representation.

Maltese cultural conservatism, heavily shaped by the Church, remained suspicious of modernist innovation. Political independence in 1964 did not translate into cultural independence. Within this context, artists who wished to face the modern challenge by creating experimental work were, in effect, sacrificing their careers: being modern meant exclusion from the ecclesiastical and state commissions upon which their livelihoods depended.

When Cremona exhibited his Glass Collages in 1969, they were met with confusion and hostility. The Maltese public, conditioned by decades of ecclesiastical art and illustrative clarity, struggled to comprehend this sudden embrace of fracture, abstraction and raw materiality.

Not merely aesthetic experiments but acts of resistance

The criticism was severe enough to drive Cremona back to the safety of ecclesiastical commissions. These works were never exhibited again during his lifetime in Malta.

Yet these works were far from failures. Rather, they testify to Cremona’s artistic allegiance to experimentation, risk and modernist inquiry. For Maltese art to participate meaningfully in the European experience of modernity, Cremona understood that it had to risk rupture.

In producing these works, he subscribed – however briefly – to the modernist belief that art must evolve by confronting its own limitations, initiating a cycle of destruction and renewal akin to Clement Greenberg’s notion of necessary ‘devolution-evolution’ in the pursuit of a new visual language.

The Glass Collages bear witness to Cremona’s recognition that Malta could no longer remain insulated from the broader European artistic developments.

Cremona’s position thus finds a close analogue to that of sculptor Toni Pace, whose experiments in welded metal sculpture between 1964 and 1966 similarly sought to engage with the international language of abstraction. His engagement with welded metal sculpture marked Malta’s first serious dialogue with constructivism and post-war European sculpture.

Like Cremona’s collages, Pace’s works broke with local tradition by embracing industrial materials and abstraction, drawing inspiration from British contemporaries and the broader modernist vocabulary of Anthony Caro and Lynn Chadwick.

However, the Maltese art scene, still rooted in naturalistic sculpture, offered little encouragement. By the late 1960s, Pace had retreated from abstraction, returning to more conventional work.

Both artists thus encountered a local cultural sphere unable and unwilling to accommodate practices that deviated from the entrenched norms of figurative, religious or commemorative art.

This Maltese aversion to the modernist project in the 1960s and 1970s highlights a broader tension between innovation and tradition that shaped the trajectory of Maltese art well into the late 20th century.

Unlike their counterparts in larger European centres, Maltese modernists lacked the critical mass and cultural dialogue necessary to sustain avant-garde practices. Both artists’ retreats from experimentation can thus be viewed as symptomatic of Malta’s broader cultural conservatism during this period.

Cremona’s Glass Collages, however, also reveal something more personal: a hesitation, a reticence, a recognition of limits.

In this sense, Cremona can be compared to the hesitant narrator of T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – tentative, questioning, unsure whether to ‘disturb the universe’.

During these brief, flirtatious years, Cremona dared to sing his own ‘love song’ through glass, rope and tar, adhering to the modern zeitgeist and bringing forth a world not through representational art but through the obstinate fact of matter itself.

In the Maltese context, these Glass Collages can be considered among the boldest avant-garde artworks ever produced on the island. They stand as radical interventions in a cultural environ­ment unprepared to receive them, as poignant reminders of the fragility of avant-garde ambition in small, conservative societies.

Cremona’s Glass Collages are thus not merely aesthetic experiments but acts of resistance: resistance to the expectations of ecclesiastical art, resistance to the parochialism of Maltese cultural life and resistance to the reduction of art to a religious function.

They reveal an artist grappling with the modern condition, seeking new visual languages through the immanence of matter itself. They are monuments – however fragile, however fleeting – to the risks of experimentation in hostile terrain. Their material fragility thus mirrors the fragile cultural space during which they came into being.