In the third in a series of articles about 20th-century artists who shaped Maltese modernism, Joseph Agius appraises the creative journey of Raymond Pitrè

The art of Raymond Pitrè (b. 1940) is as 20th-century as it can get − expressionist, existential, angst-ridden, conceptual, tortured. It ticks all the right boxes.

Screaming Man

His art is an honest portrayal of the man: a kaleidoscope of personalities, moods changing like a Scottish day in summer. The artist’s complexity is transferred onto his canvasses, which overflow with mixed emotions, pathos, manias, frustrations and obsessions.

The first time I visited his studio in 1993, I was shocked by the visual onslaught of his canvasses and sculptures. The colour screamed at me; mouths shrieking and grimacing in unspeakable pain, the jazz − I believe it was Coltrane − pouring out of his cassette player, setting the mood. Here was genius at work and genius is mad.

The studio was like a cavern and Ray welcomed us in. His friendly demeanour clashed with my preconceptions arising from a contrived notoriety. The urban myth had it that Pitrè wasn’t all there, that he had lost his marbles along the way. We talked for hours, heralding the start of a very long friendship.

Pitrè was born in 1940 during an air raid by enemy aircraft. He didn’t like school much and wasn’t averse to playing truant. From early childhood, he showed an exceptional aptitude at drawing. Artist Anton Inglott (1915-1945), who died when Pitrè was merely five years old, was the husband of his aunt, a legacy which Ray always cherished.

Triumph of Death. Right: Mother.

Pitrè  is unabashedly proud that he never actually attended any art school and that he is self-taught. Discovering the work of Salvador Dalì was his first brush with international art; surrealism intrigued him and won him over.

A self-portrait of Raymond Pitrè

In the late 1950s, he joined a monastic order which was a short-lived interlude as it wasn’t his calling. Failure to win a national art competition caused a lot of disappointment and he was ready to give up on pursuing art as a career. Talking retrospectively, he always rued his decision to join the police force but he had to make ends meet. However, this ironically sealed his fate as one of Malta’s foremost portrait painters as, while working at the police depot, he was commissioned to execute the portrait of the then prime minister, Dom Mintoff. This secured his livelihood as, thereafter, a stream of portrait commissions flowed unabatedly.

In the mid-1960s, he worked on the first of his Scream series which guaranteed his position as a foremost protagonist of the local art scene. His Plastic Ghost of 66 was probably the first installation in the history of Maltese art. It was sadly mislaid or destroyed while it was loaned out for a theatrical production. Only a small sketch of it exists in a private collection.

Pitré’s screams curdle from within

While the two series of Scream demonstrated his extraordinary artistic capabilities, his Triumph of Death series effectively consecrated him. Pitrè’s three 1970s exhibitions were a huge success with art patrons and received wide critical acclaim. Meanwhile, he resigned from the police force and devoted himself wholeheartedly to art.

Scream

The relentless stream of portrait commissions supported him, his wife Franca and their two children. It also allowed him to move to his much spacious Swieqi studio.

The 1980s were a decade of mixed fortunes as his late 1980s exhibition Baroque Variations met with unfavourable reviews. For some, this exhibition reflected badly on his artistic development − the artist was struggling with a compulsion to appeal to a wider audience.

The fallout resulting in the aftermath of this inauspicious exhibition provoked a reaction and he escaped away from it all by exiling himself in his studio, which became his oyster.

The first time I met Pitrè was a time of reckoning and soul-searching for him which led to a catharsis and to a journey of reinvention. He dug in more deeply in search of existential meaning by attempting to write a 21st century novel with the ambiguous title of Doze Happy Daze. This play on words was something that amused him and still does to this day. The storyline of the novel has allegedly been altered many times together with the nature of its protagonists.

His participation in the Venice Biennale of 1999, together with Vince Briffa and Norbert Attard, was the culmination of a brilliant career and the consecration of a maverick artist, one of the greatest in our country’s art history. One of the two mixed media warriors he exhibited there enriches our national collection at MUŻA.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) and his famous Scream do not share the same vernacular as Pitrè’s Scream Series although one might think so at face value. Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and his grimacing faces and shrieking mouths are a more likely reference.

Munch’s Scream is an eruption of pain that has its origins from ‘outside the self’. The humanoid figure on the bridge is just a puny player in the grand scheme of things and is belittled and overwhelmed by a “scream passing through nature”.

Pitrè’s screams curdle from within; the existential pain so excruciating that the mouths curl into a snarl to release intimate anguish as raw emotion. In Bacon’s own words: “We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream”. 

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) was a German artist whom Pitrè revered deeply on a strictly conceptual level. His conceptual work resonates with the German artist’s controversial output.

In the early days of our friendship, I distinctly remember that he listed Enzo Cucchi, Iannis Kounellis and Daniel Buren as the three contemporary artists he looked up to. Memory fails me and I’m unable to give a context and substance to this affirmation. 

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was held in slight contempt, indicating a love-hate relationship. The novelists James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Jorge Luis Borges frequently used to come up when he discussed concepts as well as the philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Anything can inspire an artist of Pitrè’s complexity. It is this variety of stimuli that make his world go around.