Man is drawn towards the geometrical as it provides the luxury of structure and containment.  In German artist and theoretician Josef Albers words: “To design is to plan and to organise, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore, it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.” This is especially relevant to the oeuvre of veteran Maltese artist Alfred Camilleri, who has incessantly explored this axiom throughout his career and whose solo exhibition, Connections, is currently on at MUŻA.

One is immediately drawn by Camilleri’s search for structured composition – found objects offer already defined parameters in three dimensions. The spatial qualities of a box can be analysed and categorised via some predetermined and universally accepted designation. One defines a box as a factor of its length, width and height, besides by its inherent function as a container. What lies or is stored in it are the variables that determine its weight.

Alfred Camilleri

Going along some way with the Schrödinger’s cat paradox, the box might contain just air or might be the hiding place for a lazy cat, or it might carry its volume in gold, or it might contain a toxin that would kill the cat – anything is possible, even the most improbable. Detached perception alone is not enough to ‘quantise’ the box’s and its contents’ properties; one needs to open the box to defuse conjecture.

The Compo series

The Compo series of works finds Camilleri working on objets trouvés, the found boxes, releasing them of their volume and presumed content, and presenting them as two-dimensional templates in their original machine-manufactured state. The artist thus recontextualises the object through a process of recycling, relieves it of its original function and represents it as a flattened-out piece of material whose function can be intimated; it does not necessarily have to be reconstructed as a cuboid.

Compo no.3 with Black from the 'Compo' series

The artist explains: “During the creative process, the resulting contours and perforations which themselves make up the construction of the ‘box’ and being essential elements for its structural stability are untouched, unaltered.” He thus metamorphoses a prosaic and functional proto-object into a finished multilayered aesthetic piece, by adding colour and poetry and redefining it into an abstract composition, maybe suggesting a landscape or cityscape. 

Papier collé (pasted paper) was a breakthrough that the fathers of cubism, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, endeavoured upon in the last months of 1912.  Paper is adhered to a flat plane, excluding other materials from the equation. This was a development of the collage technique, mastered by Max Ernst, in which he used various materials not necessarily paper.

Compo No.4 with Earth and Black from the 'Compo' series

Braque and Picasso made use of coloured paper, printed paper, newspaper cuttings, tickets and other printed material as building blocks of the composition, which usually they used to further develop through sketch-work in pastel, charcoal or even paint.

The Scape series

In the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg pioneered the idea of ‘combines’, collages that integrated painting and sculpture into a new hybrid. The elements he used included mundane objects; the American artist decontextualised them from their everyday function to be recycled as compositional elements of a work of art. This further exploited Marcel Duchamp’s concept of objet trouvé. Rauschenberg eliminated the boundaries between painting and sculpture as some of the combines can be hung on a wall while others are free-standing sculptural conglomerations.

Atlantis - from the 'Scape' series

Camilleri’s Scape series similarly combines the two genres of sculpture and painting. He explains: “Among the various definitions of the word ‘scape’ is that of a combining form extracted from landscape, seascape, moonscape, etc. It also refers to what in botany we call a peduncle arising from a subterranean. Thus ‘scape’ combines both elements through the unification of the object and the painting in a whole composition.”

The combined abstract elements of both the sculpture and the painting create a mood, an emotion, a meaning which connects and generates the visual experience

Following the paths of the two great cubist pioneers and Rauschenberg, the Maltese artist reconfigures and recontextualises objects, complementing them with background painting that add narratives and context to a new ‘scape’. He adds that “the combined abstract elements of both the sculpture and the painting create a mood, an emotion, a meaning which connects and generates the visual experience”.

Art Connects Us

Art Connects Us is an installation of 13 framed collages, sharing the same dimensions, with a title that empathically drives the point home. The artist has collected images originating from art magazines and exhibition catalogues which he combined to form alternative narratives, extracting them from their role of official documentation of art history.

Compo No.5 with Earth from the 'Compo' series

These are essentially found objects that the artist consciously chooses from the myriad of images that he came across through the years. He re-represents them in juxtapositions in which for instance the image of a Matisse cut-out, (the original being a collage), is in conversation with a Georges de la Tour nativity painting and with the image of a sculpture of a female nude.

These works are multilayered; they bring into intimate proximity the imagery of different artistic genres as well as epochs. There is a universal ‘democraticisation’ of art history across the board, entrenched in the contemporary setting of 13 collages – indeed a visual art-historical documentation that transcends genre and time. The 13 works are interconnected through letters of the alphabet ‘inscribed’ by the artist via his compositions – each piece communicates via the building blocks of language and expression.

Metropolis from the 'Compo' series

In his paintings in which letters and numbers figured most prominently, American artist Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg’s closest friend, uses everyday motifs, intertwined and sometimes abstracted, to question perception and recognition via well-established and supposedly easily-decipherable glyphs.  “All familiar things can open into strange worlds,” Johns intuitively claimed.

Camilleri similarly investigates our familiarity with symbols that we take for granted, adding to the intrigue through an art installation whose title reads out like a message hidden amid a compendium of images – its individual 13 components delivering the universal statement that Art Connects Us.

The dog of Pompeii from the 'Scape' series

Edgar Degas once said: “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Through his solo exhibition aptly titled Connections, Camilleri is inviting us to explore our perceptive abilities so that we can investigate the interrelations and interactions between images, and subliminally create new narratives and scenarios while we’re at it.

Connections, curated by Patrick Galea and hosted by MUŻA, is on until July 24.