Updated 7.35pm

Malta’s old shopfronts and signs may be taken for granted but they seem to be captivating and catching foreign artists’ eyes, with one Polish graphic designer wanting to create a book to document them before they disappear.

Marek Sayan Skwarski is seeking support for his proposed ‘artistic’ photo album, designed to “save from oblivion part of Malta and Gozo’s aesthetic heritage”.

For the Warsaw-based designer, the shopfronts are an interesting and important piece of the islands’ history, combining commercial traditions with the Maltese  people’s “desire to always surround themselves with beauty”.

He said: “Just look at the numerous breathtaking baroque churches, beautifully decorated gallarijas, flower-filled streets in Rabat, Gozo and Mdina.” Skwarski makes a case for the preservation of the handmade vintage shop signs in his proposed project designed to protect these mementos of a bygone era.

Marek Sayan Skwarski in Rabat during his most recent visit to Malta with his whole family last week.

As a visual creator, he says he is particularly sensitive to such aesthetic treasures and details, noting with nostalgia the disappearance of the “handcrafted commercial messages” and the fact that the traditional and historical way of decorating shop signs is being replaced by new aesthetic solutions.

Modern, plastic, computer-generated signs are “a denial of the beauty and historical heritage of the islands”, he said.

What technology does today was once the product of a craftsman’s hands – the work of artists, mostly enthusiasts without specific education, who passed on their knowledge and experience from generation to generation, he said.

For this reason, he said the historic signs are works of art, and the streets where some of them still hang are “living museums”.

Skwarski’s idea is to combine the “preservation and popularisation of this heritage in the context of its centuries-old trade traditions”.

Malta has always been at the crossroads of trade routes, he noted.

“That is why trade traditions are so deeply rooted in the islands”, he said.

Mock-up of the proposed book cover.

‘I simply felt sorry for them’

A “great lover” of Malta and Gozo, Skwarski noticed the signboards during many walking tours on frequent visits to the islands.

“I had to come here twice for business purposes, and I fell in love,” he said.

“I have walked all of Gozo and half of Malta, absorbing the beautiful, old architecture and extraordinary landscape, and meeting different, kind people.”

In Poland, he said, such “typographic treasures” did not exist because communism eliminated private trade and services. The state-owned shops did not care about aesthetics and, after 1989, he said ugly and ill-considered signs took over.

“So, when I saw how the old shop signs here were decaying and forgotten, I simply felt sorry for them.”

Skwarski is aware times are changing and “new approaches to trading and profit often impose shortcuts”.

Skwarski is appealing for financial support and any form of cooperation for his book of the hidden design treasures on the streets of Malta and Gozo to materialise.

He is looking for a publisher to help immortalise these reminders of times when things were made by hand.

In his quest for a partner to carry out this task, he has sent inquiries to several publishing houses and cultural institutions.

“But it was as if they were not interested in this topic,” he said.

He may not have received concrete feedback to his appeal, but the designer has already planned the book project meticulously: it would open with an extensive introduction by a contemporary Maltese artist or art historian, while he would take care of professional photography and its graphic layout.

Skwarski already believes it would be a “small work of art”, which would be wanted in “every Maltese home where traditions are cultivated and heritage is preserved”.

If it works out, he already has bigger plans: digitising the fonts used on these signs and making them publicly available, as well as promoting the making of new signs in the old style.

Mock-up of the proposed book.

The allure of Malta’s old shopfronts

Skwarski follows on the heels of British artist Barnaby Barford, whose exhibition, Topia, saw him take over 11,000 photographs of old shopfronts and create 1,000 miniature, fine bone China buildings, each representing one of the shops he encountered.

They were recently displayed in a Heritage Malta installation at MUŻA, the National Community Art Museum in Valletta.

A publication featuring interviews and photos of the shopkeepers offers further insight into the stories of these “beloved local establishments”.

Charles Azzopardi, a photographic history researcher, has tackled the theme “extensively” in four books, including Portals of Valletta, Doors of Malta, Façades of Malta and Maltese City Façades.

“It has been in human conscience for a while,” Azzopardi said, referring to a relatively unknown Maltese photographer, Gerald Formosa, who was already documenting shop signs as they were disappearing back in the 1970s.

Formosa’s photographic work has been rediscovered and recently donated by his son to the Malta Image Preservation Archive (MIPA) for conservation and digitisation.