At the threshold of becoming: The metamorphic vision of Anthony Catania’s Antler

National Museum of Archaeology, Valletta, Malta – curated by Dr Jean Pierre Magro

“He was undone by the act of seeing.” — Ovid, Metamorphoses III

Ovid’s piercing observation on Actaeon’s fate – destroyed not for wrongdoing but for seeing – sets a resonant prelude to Antler Cry, Anthony Catania’s immersive exhibition at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta. The show transforms the richly decorated Baroque chamber into a  shadowed, mythic environment. Draped entirely in black, the space becomes a Janus-faced threshold, opening onto a world defined by metamorphosis, perception, and the volatility of vision.

Rooted in the Ovidian myth of Actaeon, the exhibition revisits the story in which the young hunter inadvertently beholds the naked body of the goddess Artemis at her bath – an act of forbidden sight that seals his transformation into a stag and his death at the jaws of his own hounds, creatures who had been his closest companions. Renaissance masters such as Titian and Carracci long codified this encounter, yet Catania moves beyond mere narrative illustration. The goddess is sensed only through symbols – a temple, moonlight, the shadow of antlers – shifting the myth to an inner landscape of psychological metamorphosis.

The exhibition opens with Whispers in the Ashen Thicket, a twilight scene of a lone dog beside a rotunda, subtly recalling the round temples of ancient Rome, particularly that of Venus. It suggests divinity without depicting it. The tranquility dissolves as the visitor moves into a corridor lined with pastel drawings and oil paintings depicting Acteon’s death. Skeletal forms, hybrid anatomies, and bodies in states of dissolution flicker between emergence and erasure. Their charged immediacy recalls Egon Schiele and carries the mythic materiality associated with Anselm Kiefer and the psychological ferocity of Francis Bacon. In Catania’s hands, such echoes become undercurrents rather than citations, signaling bodies caught in the raw threshold between flesh and its unmaking.

Here the exhibition’s central reversal crystallizes: the hunter becomes the hunted, the viewer becomes the viewed. Actaeon – the one who looks – is transformed into the one looked at, misrecognized and destroyed by those who once knew him best. This inversion extends to the visitor’s experience. As viewers read the layered works, the gaze seems to return. The exhibition is not merely observed; it observes back. The result is an introspective environment that compels confrontation with emotions often avoided: grief, violence, turbulence, and the thresholds that accompany transformation.

The hunter becomes the hunted, the viewer becomes the viewed

This atmosphere is orchestrated by curator Dr. Jean Pierre Magro, whose background in film lends the exhibition a cinematic rhythm. Movement through the rooms feels sequential - each chamber a visual “cut,” each shift in light or scale a modulation of tone. Visitors move through the exhibition not as passive viewers but as participants in a mythic procession.

The emotional apex appears in the central chamber, dominated by the monumental canvas Antlered Transfiguration Under Death’s Gaze. A vast field of red-splattered, layered, gouged-hovers between abstraction and anatomy. The work’s visceral density reveals Catania at his most unrestrained: a painter unafraid of rupture, whose pigments behave like living matter. Here metamorphosis is not merely depicted but enacted – the surface bearing the scars of scraping, erasure, and Pollock-like bursts of paint, as though the materials themselves were undergoing Actaeon’s violent unmaking. In this crucible-like room, Catania transforms myth into a psychological encounter, a confrontation with the psychic and bodily thresholds where identity breaks open and something new begins.

At the heart of the exhibition lies a single, recurring question: Is transformation a curse or an awakening? Antler Cry refuses to resolve this tension. Instead, it invites viewers to inhabit the threshold where both may be true.

The spatial design heightens this journey. The visitor must literally turn a corner, a pivot mirroring the exhibition’s deeper themes of procession, metamorphosis, and inward transformation. As the path narrows, the imagery softens into contemplative studies. These quieter reflections shift the emotional register from violence to its aftermath, offering a meditative space in which the viewer processes rupture and resonance. The final works represent grief with surprising serenity - twilight scenes in which death appears not as terror but as transition.

To exit, visitors part a final black curtain, a gesture of emergence. They return to the starting point subtly altered - an embodied echo of Heraclitus’s reminder that no one steps into the same river twice.

Catania’s work resonates within Malta’s layered cultural landscape. The island’s identity-shaped by Neolithic temples, Arabic linguistic echoes, Catholic and Baroque ritual, Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, and the fortifications of the Knights – forms a scaffold for the exhibition’s meditation on rupture and resilience. Even the island’s Globigerina limestone embodies a striking duality: strong enough to raise fortresses, yet soft enough to weather and crumble, holding endurance and vulnerability at once. That same duality underpins Antler Cry - its images shifting between violence and tenderness, solidity and dissolution, mythic grandeur and intimate psychological depth. In this sense, the exhibition becomes not only a retelling of a Greco-Roman myth but also a reflection on Malta’s cycles of transformation, while speaking to the deeply human and universal experiences of loss, change, and renewal that transcend geography and time.

Ultimately, Antler Cry distinguishes itself through its commitment to storytelling as inquiry. Together, Catania and Magro reanimate the Actaeon myth not as fixed narrative but as psychological encounter - an exploration of metamorphosis, grief, vision, and the fragile thresholds where meaning emerges. The exhibition compels viewers to confront the spaces where terror and beauty converge, suggesting that transformation - whether personal, cultural, or mythic—occurs precisely at that intersection.