“Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning” – Samuel Butler
A sense of expectation, or maybe foreboding, is a constant in Gozitan artist David Debono’s oeuvre. He depicts fleeting moments as anecdotes originating from a murky subconscious. He interprets these fragments of memory when he elegiacally transposes them as possible narratives. His quest is similar to that of American artist Andrew Wyeth, an artist whom he admires. Wyeth was after “a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment”. The term ‘Anecdotes’ demands a flow of recollection rather than a momentary flash of realisation. At times, this Proustian reaching out to one’s past life elicits nostalgia. At other times, the shroud of denial is lifted and the sharp pangs of remorse have nowhere to hide.
Debono suggests and hints at a storyline but leaves it entirely up to the viewer to decipher the content and the context. There is the same sense of disorientation that one experiences when one comes across a tattered and decrepit album of old family photos. One attempts to give a context to these strangers, these ghosts that demand respect and that disdainfully look back as if no time at all had passed. One almost cluelessly thumbs through the album, page after page, in the hope that these ancestors break their oath of silence to retell their tales once more.
Through this collection of paintings, Debono seems doubtful of reality as he endows the protagonists of his paintings with a silky translucence and evanescence. Like ghosts from one’s past that can resurface when least expected, they can just as quickly vanish in a haze. Debono’s anecdotes are structureless recollections stemming from his personal life history. The Gozitan artist chronicles them as in a diary whose pages are loose and for which chronology is of no consequence.
Two old, frail and apparently feminine hands are cradled in a lap as resignation to the throes of old age. Palms down and disembodied, they attempt to clutch at the diaphanous shroud-like cloth as they lifelessly surrender to the inevitability of death. Through Pro-Memoria, Debono has masterfully captured a moment of pathos as expressed through the helplessness of a pair of hands in anticipation of eternal rest.
One can draw parallels with British artist Dorothy Mead’s pair of disembodied hands which are full of life and young vitality. Mead’s hands belong to a body somewhere out there, its absence further defining its irrelevance to them.
Unlike the hands in Pro-Memoria, they do not seek a lap for comfort and support. Palms open, they are ready to slap if unnecessarily provoked. Debono emphatically suggests that strength has seeped out through every vein and pore as these 10 fingers and two palms have been through the thick of things. French novelist Victor Hugo claimed that: “In joined hands there is still some token of hope, in the clinched fist none”. The hands so poignantly portrayed in Pro-Memoria are still able to caress an infant’s head as stories are once again retold, those anecdotes of days of old.
The Wreckage of Thy Flesh is a very complex painting that can be interpreted in different ways. Debono’s title for this work involves the second person singular, addressed in the old English form. This adds a Biblical solemnity, which imparts a sacred and spiritual significance to this painting. The title, a statement in itself, can refer to some fictitious apocryphal old testament anecdote in which an admonishing God the Father patronisingly points fingers at the sorrowful human condition for which He denies all responsibility.
A contemporary take on Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism is a philosophical ideology that was proposed in the third century AD by the philosopher Plotinus. It tried to arrive at a comprehensive view of the universe and man’s place within it. Some thinkers that lived during the Renaissance revived this field of thought.
Many of the artists of the time interpreted the concept as pictorial anecdotes, derived from mythology, the Holy Scriptures and other sources as they hoped to somehow comprehend the nature of the Ineffable One.
A sense of expectation, or maybe foreboding, is a constant in Gozitan artist David Debono’s oeuvre
The Fall is a complex work that draws from different sources and that Debono has imbued with Neoplatonist ideals. Elements from Classical Greek Mythology and the Old Testament come together to tell a new story, one which owes its origins to some of the oldest stories ever told.
Its overpowering dimensions open a window into an ancient world, one in which Humanity’s fall from grace is imminent. Envy, as a very evil and fully clothed crone replaces the Old Testament serpent. She hides behind a Tree of Knowledge or a Tree of Life that has withered by the touch of one of the seven deadly sins.
Debono depicts envy as a scheming and focused woman ready to pounce like a predator and destroy everything that reminds her of bubbling life, radiant youth and beauty. Old age has deprived her of her charms and envy threatens to overcome her. The young and naked couple are as yet unaware of the drama that is unfolding. The man is enthralled by his own reflection in a mirror while the young woman becomes aware of her nudity. She tries to cover herself, ashamed and self-conscious, rather like the Old Testament Eve.
The searing light of enlightenment that floods the composition freezes the three protagonists in a diagonal that traverses the length of the painting. Debono draws on the Greek Classical Myth of Narcissus and the Garden of Eden account in the Book of Genesis to create an anecdote that is a Neoplatonist hybrid of both and that is invitingly open to interpretation.
HomecomingFrom Cross Channel to Anecdotes
Anecdotes, Debono’s first solo exhibition, is a chronicle of stories. Some of them are dystopian in both theme and narrative. Cross Channel, his November 2017 collaboration with Maltese contemporary artist Mark Mallia, introduced him to the art-loving public as a chronicler of Gozitan tales of yore.
His poignant style of realism, the restrained palette, the Andrew Wyeth love for the land that is his birthplace all came together in a series of 15 paintings. Every single one of them delivered a nostalgic craving for a time that is no more. The Land Where Time Stood Still, as Gozo is often described, hints at a utopia of some sort.
I Am the Abbot of Cockaigne works like a bridge between the two exhibitions. Cockaigne is the name of a medieval utopian land of luxury, idleness and plenty. The title of the medieval drinking song, incidentally included by Carl Orff in his oratorio Carmina Burana, inspired Debono to portray the fictional Abbot, succumbing to his vice and getting drunk and making merry.
A new direction
Homecoming suggests a return from a journey away from our shores. Although devoid ofthe realism of human drama, it is a dramatic landscape in which morning has just broken and the early morning mist slowly dissipates.
The Wayne Thiebaud bird’s eye perspective, the Church, the hilly contours, the silvery slither of the tarmacked streets and the jet-black sea, even though threatening and deadly, are strangely calming and reassuring as one realises that this is home.
One feels that: “There is something that involves the imagination to capture the power of the land; something contemporary about something very ancient.” Karen Wright’s words in her interview of David Hockney for Intelligent Life Magazine are what Debono’s landscape transmits.
A deep-seated respect of tradition is a Debono trademark. He diligently primes and prepares the boards himself. Besides brushes, old rags are used to caress and distribute the pigment as he creates depth, light and shadow. The Gozitan artist demonstrates that the traditional and the modern can co-exist to produce something extraordinary.
The contemporary Spanish realist master Antonio López García, whom Debono acknowledges as an important mentor, believes that “something else, the substance of your spirit, stays incorporated in the work. The work is made to transmit emotion. The starting point of the artist, if they are figurative, is the world. The material with which you work is the objective world, but you incorporate some of your soul, and that is art.” And that is Debono’s objective as well.
Anecdotes runs at The German Maltese Circle, St Christopher Street, Valletta until October 18. Check the German Maltese Circle website as regards opening hours.