Sunday saw the unveiling of important works of high art and of intense devotion in the parish church of St Publius, Floriana.

Natives of this historical city have always cultivated with singular passion their sense of belonging, their civic pride, be it in football rivalry, be it in a healthy vanity for augmenting the splendours of their major place of worship. They built, rebuilt, enlarged, embellished their church over the centuries.

The pictorial decoration of the higher registers of the temple followed after the completion of the stonework. The church entrusted the main nave to the genius and the belief of Emvin Cremona who, as expected, came up with an unrelenting series of masterpieces of faith-driven art. Cremona died in 1987 before he could complete the painting of the immense surfaces of the entire temple.

Then the time came for the adornment of the two vast side chapels. Who would take up the challenge to bring this decidedly ambitious pictorial project to completion?

Happily, the choice fell on John Grima, the youngish but eminently mature painter, sculptor and designer from Gozo. Grima is equally at ease with figurative as he is with abstract art. He is in his depth with realism as securely as he is with symbolism. His creativity communicates with the quantifiable as fluently as it does with the mystic.

Any artist who has to take up a project where another artist left off, faces agonising dilemmas – essentially, how to be true to himself without destabilising the grand schemes traced by his forerunner; how to speak with his own distinctive voice without mismatching the already existing harmonies. Could this problematic symbiosis be achieved between an artist as commanding, as ruthlessly distinctive as Cremona, and Grima, equally forceful but with different sensibilities, and with his own very individual artistic world view?

I have seen Grima’s finished work in the apse of the chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary on the left-hand side of the church and my answer is a resounding yes. Grima did not surrender any fraction of his personality but managed all the same to marry his art to Cremona’s.

The result leaves no doubt as to what is whose, but the two coexist, if not actually fortify, each other. The new series consists of 12 paintings in oils on canvas, glued to the masonry supporting them from behind. Grima tells me he has been working on them in his Gozo studio and on site for almost the past three years.

Grima did not surrender any fraction of his personality but managed all the same to marry his art to [Emvin] Cremona’s

The images bring together different themes, one being four full-length portraits of leading ecclesiastics connected with the devotion to St Publius in Floriana – from auxiliary bishop Angelo Portelli, a Dominican, to a parish priest of Floriana, Fr Salvatore Gaffiero, who also became auxiliary bishop, to archbishops Giuseppi Mercieca, recently deceased, and Pawlu Cremona, also a Dominican.

The ceiling includes four pendentives, female representations of leading virtues – faith, hope, love and chastity, all of stellar elegance and beauty. Their sculptural qualities betray Grima the gifted sculptor, author of such outstanding three-dimensional works as the bronze doors of St George’s basilica in Victoria, Gozo, the Laparelli-Cassar monument and the haunting Four Knights, both next to Piano’s parliament house in Valletta. St Publius’s virtues capture the statuesque and the aethereal in the same loop. They rank among my favourite highlights in this cycle.

The tour de force would be the largest segment, the hollowed apse of the chapel, representing the shipwreck of St Paul in Malta in the presence of Publius, chief of the island. This subject, with variants, has been depicted innumerable times by baroque, classical, Nazarener, veristi and eclectic artists.

Grima has chosen a different, more internalised approach to depict a determining moment of the shipwreck narrative − when the bedraggled crew and passengers of the sinking vessel were welcomed ashore by the natives and a viper snarled up from the bonfire to bite Paul.

The saint, portrayed as young and athletic, looks not one bit concerned that the venom may kill. While fear and consternation overcome those around him, St Paul has the strength and the serenity that faith inevitably vanquishes evil. The palette, unified through the autumn colours suggested by the aftermath of a killer storm, lends some faint Caravaggist undertones to the composition.

Another self-contained ceiling composition refers to the second salient episode of the Maltese Pauline native – the miraculous healing of the father of Publius, lying prostrate with fever and dysentery. Paul hauled him back to health by praying over him. Again, a recurrence of the unifying theme that faith conquers evil.

One of the strengths that distinguishes Grima’s art is his mastery in composing abstractions of colour, shapes, motion and emotion. In an ecclesiastical work within a pre-existing ambience already enslaved by figurative art, I am sure Grima must have suffered from these figurative shackles. Yet, look carefully: he did sneak in unobtrusively whiffs and echoes of abstraction. Perhaps mischievously, he could not resist it, bully for his discreet daring.

Now the empty spaces of the chapel opposite that of the Holy Rosary beckon. Grima will be starting work on them soon. I can’t wait to see the outcome.