“The very essence of architecture consists of a variety and development reminiscent of natural organic life” – Alvar Aalto.

Silence is the music of sacred spaces. A search for God in the darkness and light, for a revelation in the contrast and shadow. The dialogue, or prayer, is intimate and inaudible.

Taħt it-Taraġ - Maltese Townhouse

This collection of 12 paintings by Kevin Sciberras communicates with us in much the same way as Giovanni Battista Piranesi is renowned to do in his use of classical and universally known Roman architecture as the springboard for his manipulations. These he developed into improbable structures that defied traditional architectural viewpoints.

Sciberras intentionally manipulates the purely representational and adds an alternative possibility by layering paint to erase memo­ries and create new ones. These fragments, these shards are metaspaces that defy the constraints of faithful representation as the artist transcends their reality.

Albert Einstein postulated that “The subtlety of the concept of space was enhanced by the discovery that there exist no completely rigid bodies. All bodies are elastically de­formable”. The Italian Arte Metafisica master, Giorgio de Chirico, deformed the large, open spaces and froze them in time, emptied urban meeting places of all human activity while immersing them in perpetual twilight and in a post-apocalyptic deafening silence.

The property of deformation of space conceptually gives artistic licence to interpret the perceived subject matter, namely a finite volume confined by the architecture. Sciberras recreates it as a slightly out of synch possibility that, as in the case of some de Chirico paintings, excludes all human activity and revels in our ancestors’ repertoire of architecture. It is a purge that eliminates the bad memories of the polluting human factor. Humanity has fallen from grace and has failed to redeem itself.

The layering of light and shadows in the Maltese artist’s general oeuvre bears parallels to that of Lyonel Feininger. The American-German artist and Malta’s own Harry Alden’s style of hard edge has rubbed off on Sciberras. The late Maltese artist was Sciberras’ tutor for a number of years and the younger artist reinterpreted the technique and made it his own.

As the Spaces cycle of paintings shows, this dignified property of nothingness is relative and very subjective

However, Spaces demonstrates a step away from the disciplined rigidity of hard edge. Sciberras has moved towards an aesthetic that does away with the steady rhythm of his previous works and creates a new score that finds its fulfillment in the intricacy of the fabric of the confined space. The searing light coming in from the windows, from the sun itself as well as other sources is its metronome. He refrains from a Willie Apap two-tone embellishment that would have deafened the spiritual silence of these metaspaces.

Il-Kappella tal-Ġenb, the Chapel of the Langue of Aragon, St John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta

Carmenu Mangion, one of the pioneers of Maltese Modernism, had tackled this theme resulting in a number of paintings of cathedral interiors, among which that of Valletta’s St John’s Co-Cathedral. He used a very vivid expressionist palette and progressively re­duced the architectural details in favour of a František Kupka orphic abstraction and an obvious break from faithful representation.

This is in contrast with Sciberras, who has deliberately focused on the particular architectural details. As in Piranesi, we are led to believe that this alternative is more probable than Mangion’s since Sciberras’ representation is extremely faithful to the baroque original.

The diffuse light that penetrates from the windows endows the architecture of these places of worship with a divine incandescence. Maltese contemporary artist Jon Grech had shared this aspect of Sciberras’ sensibility through a small series of thematically similar works. Memory, like architecture, crumbles and deteriorates. Meanwhile it creates new anecdotes which eventually merge into a new apparently unshakeable truth.

War, besides deterioration, causes ruin. The latter implies the slow and relentless passage of time; the former the instantaneous destruction that is the product of human folly. The aftermath of both is an ironic but elegiac beauty that is symbolic and very eloquent.

British art historian Kenneth Clark rather polemically claimed that “Bomb damage is in itself picturesque”. Fellow British artist John Piper shared this view when he was commissioned to pictorially document the Coventry Cathedral and other significant ruins by the War Artists Advisory Committee and the Recording Britain Project. Piper depicted these eviscerated vulnerable buildings that had withstood the indignity of time and human madness. The aesthetics of the Romantic movement were reinterpreted by him. The ruins were transformed into a thing of universal beauty.

Taħt il-Loġoġ, Pjazza Reġina, Valletta

The perspective in Sciberras’ It-Teatru – Manoel Theatre, Valletta hints at something Piperesque. The tromp l’oeil that decorates the ceiling of the baroque building introduces an apparent heavenward evisceration. The sun-like prismatic chandelier refracts its own light in cobweb-like layers that are projected against the cavernous and empty theatre boxes. The lack of an audience and performers on stage evokes a silence that is pregnant, desolate and reeking of the earthy mustiness of an abandoned memory filled space.

Sciberras uses an earthy palette, evoking the one that is found in Honoré Daumier’s theatre paintings. These particular works demonstrate the French artist’s mastery of grim caricature as the human component takes centre stage. The architectural details of the theatre itself can only be glimpsed as a mere backdrop to the drama unfolding on and off stage.

The Maltese artist’s interpretation of the theatrical space requires that the performance is over and that the boisterous audience has dispersed into the streets and gone home. However, someone has forgotten to switch off the chandelier after the performance. The architecture demands that its ghosts are to come out and play. Daumier was interested in the psychology and behaviour of the masses in the enclosed space of the theatre. Sciberras’ interest lies in the metaphysics of the empty space itself.

The mathematical precision in the architecture of the colonnades that define the cloister of St Dominic’s priory, Rabat, is brought to the fore by the artist in the painting with the self-explanatory title of Il-Kunvent – St Dominic’s Priory, Rabat. This holds also true for the painting Taħt il-Loġoġ – (Piazza Reġina), Valletta. The Mediterranean sun blasts the architecture’s fabric, which diffracts the powerful rays into two interdependent components of light and shadow. Out of these, Sciberras weaves out a new space that is complementary. One is casually reminded of musical counterpoint.

Rather like American photographer Paul Strand, the Maltese artist merges the actual architecture with the abstract possibilities and patterns thus derived. Strand’s Wall Street, 1915, was epoch defining. The cavernous apertures of the imposing J.P. Morgan and Co. Building and the elongated shadows of the passers-by demonstrate the interplay between realism and abstraction. He developed and further abstracted the principle in works like Porch Shadows, 1916, and Porch Railings, Twin Lakes Connecticut, 1916.

The sunlight falling on the railings, deliberately out of the field of view, creates abstracted patterns of light and shadow in much the same way as the colonnades of the cloisters do in Sciberras’ paintings. In her essay for the photographer’s monograph Paul Strand: Circa 1916, art historian Maria Morris Hambourg writes that Strand was moving “beyond the material, he was making plastic equivalents of the intangible, of the transcendent forces that shape experience, and of the vitality that links all things”.

Composition-wise, Taħt it-Taraġ bears a slight resemblance to Andre Kertesz’s famous Chez Mondrian. The stillness of a moment captured in time is eloquent and poetic in both cases. The Kertesz still life of the flowers and vase on a table is mirrored by the Sciberras still life of a classical urn on an ornamental pedestal, this being essentially a component of the architecture itself. The undulating staircases lead to the unknown. The wooden balustrades in the staircase of Mondrian’s house and the stone ones in Sciberras’ Taħt it-Taraġ both warrant human activity, which is glaringly lacking in both cases. The bleak sunlight and the corresponding shadows compound the solitude which is etched in a moment of spiritual melancholy.

Through Kevin Sciberras’ collection of 12 works that make up the Spaces exhibition, one recalls American novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s claim that “Architects give us temples in which something marvellous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.” However, as the Spaces cycle of paintings shows, this dignified property of nothingness is relative and very subjective.

Spaces is open to the public at the Circolo Gozitano, 6, Sir Adrian Dingli Street, Victoria, from tomorrow until Friday.

L-Oratorju tal-Kunċizzjoni, Oratory of the Immaculate Conception, Jesuit Church, Valletta