Contemporary artist Vince Briffa is currently exhibiting his latest work at the Heritage Gallery, Royal Naval College, Greenwich University, London.  The following is an artistic appreciation of his work, delivered by John Paul Grech, ambassador and close friend of the artist, at the opening of the exhibition.

At age eleven, Vincent Briffa and I shared the same art room.  I vividly recall him drawing wild horses from memory.  He sketched with disarming speed, applied colour, masterfully, and while the rest of us would be still grappling, he would be long finished. 

Half a century or so later, he offers me the privilege to speak about his art in this prestigious venue. I risk disappointing him. I harbour no personal ambition to navigate across his long and distinguished artistic career.

Artist Vince Briffa

That requires much deeper knowledge than mine. What I shall try to do is to scratch the surface and meddle with some of the notions which I frequently observe resurfacing in his work.    

Briffa refrains from being labelled, be it as a painter, sculptor, digital artist, despite pioneering digital art within the artistic canon of the University of Malta.  

He essentially produces work, indirectly reaffirming that the medium becomes solely purposeful in the act of translating a notion into a sensual reality.  It also confirms that he has embraced – across time – an array of different media, using them separately, mixed or concurrently, honing each of such skills to the point where, each one of them, becomes part of a toolbox which can be deftly utilized, to accomplish his creations.  

Despite all this, his instinctive inclination towards the ´finely drawn line´, the sheer ´potent act of drawing´, its ´edified fluidity of execution´, has never failed to prevail, and can be detected across the body of work, here on display.  

In our conversations, Briffa constantly reminisced over the notion of the ‘figurative’ going beyond ‘mere illustration’, that there is so much of the figurative in the ‘seemingly abstract’, constantly calling for attention, only if one applies ‘the right way of seeing’.  

Employing this rather unorthodox visual angle, the figurative dimension of his works, gains perhaps, a more emphatical nature than what is immediately perceivable, of how the artist can make an image more ´immediately real´ to oneself, what Francis Bacon called the ´psychological way of seeing´.

A selection of the works at the Heritage Gallery, Royal Naval College, Greenwich University, London.

But in truth, nothing is lineal or comfortably undeviating in Vincent's work. In his past, Briffa wrestled with materiality and impermanence, with the outbound and the in-between, with the inward traction or resistance between skin and flesh, as if trying to reach the violent tipping point between morphing or disconnecting, whichever way it went.  

At times, his work is absorbed in an interplay of uncovering the indefinable nature of reality, something which is empty of fixed forms, definitely amounting to something, an image as immediate and as real as can be, but hardly illustrative. Briffa's work reveals a compulsive attachment to what is happening at the edges of reality, experienced or perceived; at boundaries, certain or uncertain; at sinuous ephemerality, hovering on the fringes.

It invariably provokes either equanimity or a state of unease, a tension of opposites - an energy, generating mutual causation, becoming mutually reinforcing, in citing Carl Jung.

He obsessively explores the 'edges of transition', either those heading towards chaos or those cascading to imperturbability, while deeply unlocking areas of sensation which throw the viewer into a ´widening gyre´, as it were, until one regains balance and re-engages in a clear-water interpretation of the ´essence of being´, at the outer limits of consciousness.

It is this proverbial edge, this perishable limit, margin, time undecipherable, this transience or the irrefutable futility of materiality, with all the fine syntheses in between, the fulfilling power of accident, which constitutes such fertile ground for Briffa´s work.  

Merrian-Webster defines the edge as being the line where an object begins or ends.  It constitutes the outside limit or the place farthest away from the centre. Conversely, a transition is a change or shift, a passage, a movement.  

Edges can separate, transitions can connect.  In painting - edges can glow, soft, hard or both - some graphic, others atmospheric. Watch Rothko. They can help define shapes in compositions, create movement.  

Yet, when one closes in on them, a whole visual tension unleashes itself, suddenly absorbing all the turbulence emanating at the centre and shifts it to the periphery.  This - in my view - remains Briffa's domain d'action.

On the other hand, the edge of chaos is a transition space between order and disorder, hypothesized to exist within a wide variety of systems.  The transition zone is a region of bounded instability that engenders a constant dynamic interplay between order and disorder.

As Professor Robert Bilde, Professor, UCLA, Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behaviour, put it: "The truly creative changes and the big shifts occur right at the edge of chaos".

Ambassador John Paul Grech delivering his speech.

Briffa's universe revolves around the co-existence and conspiracy of dualities – past and present; materiality and its absence; life, death and the implacable futility claiming both; light and dark, smoke or dust, with the tragedy of separation or the spirit of revival, all sublimating in impermanence.  

When interviewed lying on a couch, Bacon cynically looked David Sylvester in the eye when he crudely summed it all by saying: "We do with our life what we can, and then we die. What else is there?".  

Lucien Freud tried to recalibrate the mission: "the task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable."

Indeed, the litany of questions which these works provoke, through their visual cross-examination, their ominous titles and accompanying undertones, enables Briffa to confirm his standing as one of Malta's leading contemporary visual artists who still finds solace in the anti-chamber, while looking sideways when fact and truth pan out. 

Another section of the London exhibition.