“The richness of life lies in memo­ries we have forgotten,” Italian author Cesare Pavese once claimed.

Someone talking about a past event or the fleeting thought of someone who has since passed, or a dusty object stored away, all could summon the ghosts lurking in the subconscious. Suddenly, one is overtaken by a rush of emotion, a glow that warms one up from within.

Paul Caruana

There is the pang of sorrow, or even pain in some instances, in the knowledge that the world has moved on, that one cannot reverse time or have a time machine to physically revisit the episodes in one’s life that had rekindled such reminiscences.

However, artist Paul Caruana’s current exhibition Funny How Time…. isn’t just only about dips into the caramel fabric of nostalgia.

“This is a collection of works done during the past two years; there’s no particular theme in the exhibition, just thoughts of how life unfolds, nothing more,” Caruana affirms. “My aim was to just paint whatever hit my fancy, memories, observations of life and its occasionally funny ways. And a couple of things that I would have loved to do and experience.”

My aim was to just paint whatever hit my fancy, memories, observations of life and its occasionally funny ways. And a couple of things that I would have loved to do and experience- Paul Caruana

Being one of our country’s foremost watercolourists, the artist treats the artistic medium of choice like another person, in his words “like a mistress”.

“Watercolours have always been my favourite medium, the flow of colour, the blending and the transparent qualities, the paper showing through the colours,” says Caruana. He has used other media too, such as oils, acrylics, pen, pencils and even computer programmes. “But watercolours remain my mistress. Sometimes we talk, other times we fight, sometimes we dance to our own music. And sometimes we give each other some space,” he continues.

Not Going In Again, Too Cold

Although each painting is independent of each other, one might find that Funny How Time…. reads like an anthology of narratives, whose individual chapters elicit a measure of mutual comparisons. Circumstances might have changed, or age-old traditions are feeling the weight of passing time and have mutated into a present-day alternative.

For the young ones, some of Caruana’s paintings are an exploration of ways of life that are no more. For the older among us, they are Proustian madeleine moments that send us into memory trips, by creating our own very personal narrative concerning what we once had and what has been irretrievably lost.

Some of the stories

Flying Over the Ocean could be telling the story of a domestic Saturday morning in the 1970s when kids still played with aeroplanes and toy soldiers, amid imagined playtime scenarios of make-believe war. There were no video games to glue the young ones to laptop or smartphone screens – the boy, maybe still in his diapers, took flights of fancy, maybe helped by the vociferous reactions of his elders to international news. Three generations of the same family live harmoniously and get on with life, which was rather stress-free and very genuinely homely.

Flying Over the Ocean

“Flying over the ocean, away from the daily breaking news. Sometimes, listening to conversations between family members, the usual reports about who did what and who went where, I go back to a time when a toy airplane took me so far away, I couldn’t hear the voices anymore,” Caruana recalls.

It was a life dedicated to everyday chores and blessed by statues of saints that seemed to be part of every household, in this case a Valletta one with the obligatory effigy of St Paul. The outside is invited in as neighbours were friends indeed and friends in need.

I’ll Mop the Floor Again, No Worries perfectly depicts the humorous situation in which the house-proud lady of the house is trying to come to terms with antagonistic feelings welling deep inside her. The yearly house blessing by a priest, which happened on a weekday after Easter Sunday, was a stressful time for most women of the house.

I'll Mop the Floor Again

The date of the visit would have been announced for weeks, so the house is bright and spic and span to welcome the visitor, usually accompanied by an altar boy. The priest sprinkles blessed water all around, the woman trying to hide her worry that the housework had been in vain.

Caruana recollects an actual childhood event: “I loved the blessing of our home as part of the Easter celebration. This one I still remember, when our neighbour actually told the priest those words about mopping the floor after he would leave. I was the one playing sheriff!”

The seasons in our childhood, before climate change, were rather well-defined. Summer didn’t use to linger to late November. Paradise on a Late Autumn Afternoon chromatically evokes the season, when the produce of the land was lovingly harvested, with even the women­folk helping all along.

Paradise on a Late Autumn

However, Caruana insists that this painting is an imaginary idyllic scenario, inspired by his urge to use a particular colour, in this case red. “This work is also about the wish to escape somewhere away from the busy city streets, dreaming that there’s still a piece of unspoiled land somewhere on these islands that just draws me away to paint works like this. I can almost hear the sounds of the whispering fieldworkers, the rustling of the crop and the cries of the birds above. Nothing wrong with imagining, at least the place exists in my mind, my heart and my soul,” he adds.

Manoel Island, Here We Come is all about adventure, of being together, of enjoying each other’s company. It’s a craving for a time when the world around us was our own playground and we didn’t need to be children to participate in the game. We created scenarios in which everyone felt they were included.

Manoel Island, Here We Come

It wasn’t our avatars who dived into the sea and who felt elated when the mission had been accomplished. “We would swim over to Manoel Island, often trying to avoid boats and even MV Għawdex on certain occasions on our way back to Marsamxett,” Caruana observes. “What’s life without a little adventure anyway? Sometimes it was to Tignè too. It depended on the morale of the gang.”

Funny How Time…. relates to us

The choice of title by Caruana is an invitation to ponder on how the passage of time has affected us and how it has changed us. It is an open-ended statement that allows the viewer to take in the visual prompts of the paintings, how the titles relate to our biog­raphies and how we react to both by either shedding a tear or by knowingly smiling.

Rabat to Valletta, Late Evening

“What I paint is what moves me inside, and that can be anything from light on a wall to a raging storm. Above all, life itself, in all its ways, good or bad,” the artist remarks. This honest acknowledgment is a true definition of what life is all about and how it can be portrayed. There are lessons to be learned in this collection of paintings; how we can dwell on the past to maybe alter the present to have a future worth living.

Funny How Time...., hosted by Gemelli Art Gallery of Ta’ Qali, runs until October 30. Consult the event’s Facebook page for opening hours.