It is spring all the year round, the air is pure, the birds are singing and the surroundings are magical and mythical, legendary and mysterious. The atmosphere is utopic but the source is strangely natural.

Salvatore Montanucci is inspired by hilltop villages and towns in his native Sicily with cascading cubes with slanting roofs clad in red terracotta tiles and terraced as if it were the stepped gardens of Babylon.

One can imagine Gangi or Ragusa Ibla but the result is a fable and it is not unusual that one expects to suddenly imagine fairies and elves rushing out of their home to play hide and seek and running round and round holding hands.

This is the artist transformed from the dialectic of pain and suffering in his paintings of petrified male bodies of 1993-95 that became beautiful beings through fire and pain, to a man whose life has changed to a peaceful serenity, harmony and coexistence with nature.

He owes the gilded beauty of the images he creates to an initial obsession with terracotta glazed tiles (mattonelle) of such finesse that were acquired in large numbers. His bright colours seem painted over with ceramic glazes, giving them a gilded surface as old masters as Jan van Eyck used velature for light to refract and reflect light.

During this phase of his career, he painted St Sebastian tied to a stake in a Piazzale a Belvedere of Siena. It is a wonderful imaginative scene with floor covered in fine tiles and with the skyline of the city of Siena. The gilded beauty of the scene leaves one overwhelmed as he sublimates such a tragic moment.

His images of cubes or houses piled on each other like a castle or tower with peaks of hills creating a scaenae frons as in a Roman theatre is quite bewildering with the beauty of a fantastic scene that becomes in the hand of an artist a lyrical poem or fantastic dream.

Hills usually give way to rolling countryside, as in Aria di Villagio. Trinità di Monti is a triptych and the title is only a play on words. Alberi e Case conveys a sense of magic and dream. It is surreal and metaphysical.

His largest work, L’Ultima Cena (1994), shines as the floor tiles reflect light, and an echo of his bravura in urban architecture of 1997 is a scene of the Upper Barrakka Gardens supported by massive bastions and the Customs House at sea level. This painting is a virtuoso rendering of a realistic scene.

Montanucci spent years painting scenes of the city of Catania and the interior of churches of Chiaramonte Gulfi. My son, Malcolm Borg, who specialises in urban planning, wrote with praise about this phase in the artist’s career.

Montanucci was given ample permanent space in the museum of Chiarmonte Gulfi, and Sebastiano Gurrieri, then mayor, admired his talent and skill: “Although Salvatore’s art is purely material, physical and representative, its whole purpose is to penetrate deeply into life’s enigma and magic. This method or approach turns Salvatore’s work into legend, myth and fable. His work is redolent with symbols. It casts a spell on us. We feel bewitched.”

This extract from my essay in Montanucci’s publication Sentimenti del Tempo (2001) reveals his character through his art.

He is a poet, a dreamer, and his work is therapeutic. It heals. Rosa Gangemi, his mentor, recognised his poetic talent and praised him.

Montanucci is dedicating this exhibition of art works and artistic fashion to his parents: his mother Lucia née Romeo and his father Giovanni Battista. The artist was born in Acicatena, near Acireale, in 1965, and brought up in Pennisi and Lavinaio, near Aci Sant’Antonio. During his childhood the environment was pastoral and serene, far from the maddening crowds of urban confusion.

I Colori dell’Anima (The Colours of the Soul) is curated by Marika Azzopardi and hosted at Art by the Seaside Gallery, 66, Triq il-Mina tax-Xatt, Senglea. It is on until Sunday, June 9. Opening hours are Tuesday to Friday  from 4 to 8pm; Saturday, Sunday and public holidays from 10am to 1pm and from 3.30 to 8pm.