The words of literary theorist Roland Barthes, “one should not try to focus on the intentions or the original meanings of the artist but rather focus on the interaction of the spectator”, are very relevant to the approach embraced by Gozitan artist Mario Cassar.
The ‘pure’ concept that originates from somewhere within the artist’s cerebral cortex is manipulated in ways that go beyond the merely representational. They entail a personal self-identification by the viewers with the pieces. The resultant narrative or commentary is autobiographical, which doesn’t preclude it also being of social and universal relevance.
Mario Cassar in his studioThis collection works on many different levels. Each individual is invited to consult his or her own library of impulses, memories, experiences, inhibitions, images, legends, urban myths and stories to ‘breach’ and decipher the messages scrawled on a used envelop or a scrap of paper. The scribbles evoke a pre-internet age when letters were actually written before being gingerly slipped into envelopes.
The adhesive on the stamp as well as that on the lip of the envelope were moistened with saliva, thereby sealing one’s DNA for posterity in the process. This, coupled with the personal idiosyncratic calligraphy, established, without almost any shadow of doubt, the authorship of the missive.
The Cy Twombly-like pattern in the scribbles, inverted in mirror image, complement the embossed floral pattern on the envelope as in Untitled (Ittra-demm), 2018. This message lingers on, fleetingly undecipherable, like an archaic, possibly Semitic, unidentifiable language. These might be verses of a poem, an ode to romantic and maybe unrequited love. The red heart replaces the loving kiss. The same heart motif is repeated in the sketchy Christo-like architectural rendering. The fluorescent green, child-like stereotype of a palm tree adds a fable-like dimension to an impossible story.
The Maltese postal stamp adds a breach-like inkling that offers clues to the time of year in which the letter was written or, rather, posted. It fixes the letter in a time and in a space. The somewhat haphazard location of the stamp on the envelope and the inclusion of some remnants of the ‘mother’ sheet indicate a roller-coaster of enthusiasm and a penchant towards manifestations of ‘boredom’. However, like all codes, it can also be broken.
Untitled (Dies Irae), 2017Like Robert Rauschenberg, Cassar delves into the raw material of politics, current affairs, mortality, beauty and his own experiences as well as his subconscious and arrives at a multi-layered and collaged approach to context. The universality of something as banal as the Coca Cola logo attracted the attention of artists like Andy Warhol and Mario Schifano.
The strictly art-historical significance of this as a component of Cassar’s Untitled (Cola Christ), 2017, can be lost on an audience that lacks sensibility and knowledge of the oeuvre of particular artists. One can question whether this is an elitist and patronising comment on the shortcomings of the local educational institutions, which cold-shoulder art education by giving it scant relevance when establishing school curricula.
The residue, the intertwining of two worlds, is a new vernacular, a hybrid of language and art
Apocryphal gospel icons like the Vera Icon and pop culture references, like Disney’s Cinderella castle, are integrated amid art-historical ‘icons’. The heart of Jim Dine, the cryptic numbers of Jasper Johns, the Warhol/Schifano Coca-Cola signature and the Twombly scribbles are brought together by Cassar in a 21st century collage. The message is in the scribbles and, like the narrator in Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Sand, we are overwhelmed by the “defiled and corrupted reality” that defies any straightforward interpretation. Perhaps what Cassar is saying through this painting is that, like Borges suggested, too much knowledge may not be something that a man can handle.
Untitled, 2016-2020A flow of words lose structure, bleed and coagulate into a residue. Michel Foucault remarked: “The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text.”
The residue, the proverbial intertwining of two worlds, is a new vernacular, a hybrid of language and art. Twombly’s interprets the season in Autunno (Quattro Stagioni 1993-95) as a gestural metastory; Autunno is scribbled onto the canvas to endow the narrative with an identity notwithstanding the steady waterfall of text and scribbles. These are set off against a backdrop of atmospheric earthy colours that one associates with the season. Twombly narrates autumn via nuances and semantics. Cassar adopts a similar narrative technique.
Found objects also provide narrative overlap. In Cassar’s Untitled Pair, the title is a pun that the artist playfully exploits to deliver a message. The artist uses mordant, a corrosive liquid that reacts with dyes and other reagents, to etch his message in gold and copper. Thus, the eggs, taken out of their biological context, become templates for the written word, making an oxymoron out of the title that Cassar has chosen. Eggs symbolise life and new beginnings. This decontextualisation is mirrored in Cassar’s action of finding the object, in this case two ostrich eggs, and releasing them from their former constraints of established biological function to rewrite their story.
Untitled (Cola Christ), 2017Another objet trouvé is the statue of Venus, Untitled, 2016-2020, which used to be a representation of the naked goddess, worshipped on the altar of kitsch. Yves Klein’s Blue Venus is its ancestor. The artist vibrantly colours the found object as a polychrome sculpture, much in the way that the sculptors of classical antiquity coloured their divinities. In Barthes’s words: “Myth distorts the meaning of the original sign: it is no longer what it was, or what it appears, but something else.”
A Greek goddess is shrouded in mythologies that distort what she originally represented, exiled from the Pantheon to which she used to belong. Time has sheared her off her true colours to become a monochromatic concept, a frieze of an idealised beauty. Cassar follows a different trajectory to that of Untitled Pair. He uses colour to re-contexutalise an old goddess in an age in which gods are becoming ephemeral, irrelevant and monochromatic.
Cassar is inviting us to his studio for an induction into his vernacular. Symbols, messages and images merge into a language that reads like a dictionary of possibilities. Stories can run riot and lose their plot. It is up to us to read the signs, reassemble a narrative into a structure and decipher potential storylines.
Mario Cassar’s studio will only be open by appointment. Kindly phone on 7956 6274 or e-mail mariocassar75@gmail.com.
Untitled (Pair)