The selection of landscape paintings currently displayed inside the temporary exhibition space forming part of the George Fenech Museum, Mellieħa, gives rise to a series of personal reflections. And one clearly pushes itself above all others: landscape paintings are very rarely just straight topographical renditions of place.

For the medieval mind, for example, landscapes might have acquired symbolic meanings, becoming a prototype of the divine. From Petrarch onwards, landscapes became a place where one could escape from the troubles of the city, places of spiritual reprieve.

Then again, open landscapes might have been considered too unruly. They needed to be subjugated into a garden, an enclosed garden perhaps, a hortus conclusus, a heavenly orchard as beautiful as a Persian miniature, inside which the Madonna sits; a place in which even if the disruptive unicorn were to enter, it would, bedazzled, kneel in veneration. In an analogous way of thinking, the landscaped gardens in the estates of European aristocracy symbolised dominance over nature and social hierarchy.

Rooftops by Esprit Barthet

W.J.T. Mitchell’s Landscapes and Power asks us to think of landscape “not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed”.

Here landscapes might become a cultural construct, shaped by human perception, interpretation, and representation, reflecting the values, desires, and conflicts of the societies that produce them. Landscapes might be ideological, serving as tools for reinforcing power dynamics, such as colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism. For example, the depiction of the ‘untamed wilderness’ in art and literature can legitimise acts of conquest and ownership. For Mitchell, landscapes are never inert or passive; instead, they are active agents that can influence human behaviour and relationships.

St Peter’s Pool by Lino Borg

Aside from two paintings by Antoine Camilleri which take us to Bath, England, the works present in this exhibition, created by Esprit Barthet, Lino Borg and the aforementioned Camilleri, primarily depict landscapes which, even when not strictly topographical, all have a ring of Malteseness about them. They span a timeline from the mid-1940s to 2024, covering eight decades during which Malta underwent profound transformations.

But what do these images reveal about Malta, its people, their evolving sense of identity, and, perhaps, the trajectory of Maltese 20th-century art?

Paintings dating back to the 1940s, respectively made by Barthet and Camilleri, reveal two facets pertinent to mid-century Malta. Barthet’s Farmers at Work (1944) harks back to the idea of Malta as a prelapsarian island, a Gauguin-like idyll. It is an image that assertively disregards the big infrastructural and cultural changes that were just about looming on the horizon.

Tugboats 1 by Antoine Camilleri

Its modernist formative qualities clearly derive from the Impressionists, but its subject matter is patently traditional; one that envisions a Malta that could only define itself in its very reluctance to embrace anything that might be considered as foreign, a Malta meħlusa minn kull xorta ta’ qżież, (free from any form of filth) in Dun Karm’s curious turn of phrase. Painted in an immediate post-war era, this image might be Barthet’s plea to impose some order amidst the destruction wrought by a terrible war not yet completely over.

Camilleri’s pastel-on-paper Tug Boats 1 (Harbour) (c.1940), on the other hand, acknowledges, in its inclusion of the stacks above the vessels, a mechanical age, if not a world well beyond Maltese shores. For these were the tugboats that would have safely manoeuvred ships into Maltese harbours – ships that would have often traversed great distances, sometimes even from far beyond the Mediterranean Sea.

The landscapes span a timeline from the mid-1940s to 2024, covering eight decades during which Malta underwent profound transformations

In other works, Barthet might be formally adventurous, breaking down the image into a sort-of-Cubist manner to distil the typical Maltese built skyline. While Camilleri, in three of the exhibited works, lets his ballpoint roll over paper to capture a quaintly nostalgic Malta in evocative lines. His simplicity and economy of medium perhaps connoting an uncomplicated life that strongly revolved around the Church and its beliefs.

This is a Malta untouched by time. These are images that could have been made in the 1970s as much as in the 1870s, if it were not for the occasional truck that winds its way in Village 1, or the drawing medium itself, the so-called Biro, which only dates to the 1940s.

Farmers at Work by Esprit Barthet

Camilleri’s aforementioned Bath pictures remind us of the academic year he had spent at Bath School in the very early 1960s, at the time housed at Corsham Court, Wiltshire. In its post-war incarnation this was one of the most freely experimental art schools in England, very much the brainchild of the artist Clifford Ellis and Lord Paul Methuen, the owner of the sprawling manor at Corsham and an artist in his own right.

This was the academy in which just a year before Camilleri, Barthet was also trained. Alfred Chircop, Toni Pace and Joseph L. Mallia were also students at this academy, and the innovative streak that permeates much of their work must be, at least, partly due to their common Bath experience.

Lino Borg, a generation younger than both Camilleri and Barthet, was a friend to both and, for a number of years, a student of Barthet at the Malta School of Art. Here he presents us with a collection of works dating to the present age. His are images that most strongly go in search of a Malta untouched by time.

Wied il-Kbir by Lino Borg

Made during a period when land speculation and infrastructural projects are reaching worrying proportions, Borg finds timeless nooks and crannies which he paints en plein air, capturing their atmospheric immediacy in broad, assertive brushstrokes. He seems to be voraciously laying artistic claim over the areas he chooses to paint as if that would be enough to magically ward off the potential ravages inflicted by land barons and appropriators.

There is, one feels, an escapist quality with most of these images. As if artistic beauty is only possible when connections with the world of the here and now are kept as tenuous as possible. Or perhaps the rendition of landscape into art is here all the while thought of as an endeavour conducive to spiritual solace and physical reprieve rather than one leading to restless dark nights of the soul.

It might be that these works are more evocative in what they manifestly fail to acknowledge or consciously keep out: the wanton destruction of war; the changing morphology of a Malta coming to terms with the 20th century; or the insatiable greed of speculators.

The exhibition Landscape Interpretations at the George Fenech Museum, Mellieħa, will remain open until the end of January.