British author Penelope Lively once said: “To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time.”

The famous author’s works ring particularly true when one looks at this collection of 13 paintings, titled Forgotten Malta, by Ray Piscopo. The Maltese artist investigates snapshots of a life that used to exist or whose last vestiges are threatened to disappear forever under the wheels of ‘progress’. 

Progress very often entails destruction, an excision, an auto da fé, menacing our country’s legacy. To hell with its richness, its variety, its historical and anecdotal value. Let that be the world of poets, philosophers and artists who all crave nostalgia for narratives stuck in time. 

"Through his use of colour, it feels like Piscopo is trying to root these deconstructed memories before they become hopelessly out of synch with our 21st century realities"

These works by Piscopo pull on our heartstrings and we are asked to evaluate what is being lost every day as regards architectural and natural heritage, old traditions, ways of life, occupations that entailed the love for tilling of the land, besides knowledge trickling down through generations, to bring forth the produce. 

Whole ecosystems, in a more general sense of the word, are being torn apart, in the service of an economy that is brutally uninterested in any legacy to proudly forward to the next generations.

Piscopo stopped working as a professional engineer 15 years ago to fully dedicate himself to art. His design abilities, that were part and parcel of his former profession, are defining characteristics of his artistic output. His preoccupation with line and colour, in some way originates from the strong academic grounding that formed part of his engineering studies at the University of Malta, back in the 1970s. His initial calling was to become an architect but the idiosyncratic way courses were offered in those days compelled Piscopo to instead pursue engineering.

His work as an engineer offered opportunities that exploited his love for the environment. He was invested as director for the environment and was also the manager in charge of an environmental programme for the major semiconductor manufacturing firm STMicroelectronics. 

These experiences must have honed his sensibility towards the natural, historic and urban heritage of our islands, sublimely demonstrated in this collection of 13 paintings that behave like postcards, like snapshots, idealising an idyllic past, of what should be cherished and saved for posterity. 

The artist perhaps is making a statement through the colourful enhancing of memories that were bleached out via the incessant development that has overwhelmed the island since it achieved independence from the British Empire in 1964. 

However, in some cases, such as in Statwa San Franġisk − although the focus is on the beauty of the niche, the statue it harbours and the immediate architecture − there is evidence that, further up, the stepped streetscape had been pillaged and that not even the most vernacular of architecture is sacred.

The relentless passage of time

Time yellows memories just like it does black-and-white photographs. It also mellows them as they become tenuous and evanescent. 

“I wanted to portray these iconic images in my artistic idiom and to make them more attractive,” Piscopo remarks. 

In doing so, the artist reinforces the narratives as chapters documenting an ordinary life of decades ago, a simple life in which goats roamed the streets, gentlemen dressed elegantly, life unfolded effortlessly, and buildings were not torn apart. Everyone loved the land, relishing and living on what it offered, without the urgency to get rich quick, no matter the consequences.

Through his use of colour, it feels like Piscopo is trying to root these deconstructed memories before they become hopelessly out of synch with our 21st century realities. 

Monochrome melancholically belongs to life before we knew it. That of Piscopo is an exercise in bringing together epochs of our country’s history, through chromatic deconstruction. His gestural brushstrokes are reminiscent of those of Andre Masson, the French surrea­list who anticipated the advent of abstract expressionism as well as the frantic ones of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, protagonists of that same American post-World War II art movement.

Narrative chapters

A windmill (Il-Mitħna) majestically invites the wind to blow through its blades to grind the wheat, the fruit of the land in order to make bread, a staple in the diet of our ancestors. The blades seem to be tearing at the heavens above, thus evoking the power of the wind that drives the whole enterprise. 

In this post-human contemporary world, we are still discussing the worth of alternative energy in a country blessed, or cursed, by sunlight and by a wind which blusters away, almost all year round. 

Piscopo’s chromatic choices are similar to those of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian in his The Windmill in Sunlight, of 1908, one of his archetypical depictions of the mills that are so synonymous with his country’s landscape. 

In Mondrian’s paintings, generally, the mill is all alone, steadfast in solitude amid the rolling countryside. Piscopo’s mill is crowded in by buildings’ the 1960s architecture adjacent has not as yet been torn apart to be replaced by the high-rise apartments which have become an identifying soulless feature in our country’s built fabric.

Religion, tradition and other stories

The solemnity of an Our Lady of Sorrows procession, all participants, both lay and ecclesiastic, dignified and introspective, while the accompanying car blurts out prayers, incantations and evocations, has been captured by Piscopo in this depiction of one of the archipelago’s most hallowed traditions, Id-Duluri (Our Lady of Sorrows).

Despite everything that has been thrown at society in these first two decades of the 21st century, this tradition persists and has probably gained more followers in recent years. Piscopo seems to suggest that not all has been lost in the putrid progressive haze.

L-Egħrusija is an evocation of social mores that have been almost lost in the midst of time. Although the engagement to be married, or betrothal, still is sometimes entered upon between committed couples even nowadays, its relevance is only relative. 

In the past, betrothed couples were almost always accompanied by a chaperon, a cumbersome presence that diluted the nascent passion of the new couple. Nowadays, going out together as a couple implies a sexual relationship of sorts. In this painting, Piscopo recalls a time when the relationship turned sexual only after the marriage vows were exchanged.

The romanticisation of the landscape genre through the works of Caspar David Friedrich, in the early 19th century, added a still and contemplative dimension to the landscape genre, reflecting the bygone age when nature and the search for divine were major driving forces for an art that illustrated the glory of stillness and silence. Later on in the same century, the Barbizon artists followed the teachings of Camille Corot and built on the legacy of Friedrich. These artists were regarded as the French painters of nature. 

Among these was Jean-François Millet, who found inspiration in the rural life of peasants and dignified these tillers of the land, telling stories of hardship, endurance and resignation, as exemplified through his masterpiece, The Gleaners. 

Another of his ultimate masterpieces, The Angelus, poignantly arrests the moment when the two farmers, probably husband and wife, stop in their tracks as the church bell tolls. It invited them to prayer and meditation for a few moments, before they return to their daily toils. 

The farmer in Piscopo’s Il-Bidwi benefits from the fruit of industrialisation as the machine offers relief from the backbreaking toils of Millet’s peasants. Just as through the protagonists of the French artist’s paintings, Piscopo’s farmer concentrates on the task at hand and demonstrates his love to till the land.

In a country that has a dry climate and mild winters, water has always been a prized resource. Tal-Ilma and Tirgħa in-Nagħaġ represent labour which is no more. Piscopo has transposed the arcadian simplicity, glorified by Maltese artists such as Edward Caruana Dingli and Ġanni Vella, as vivid, chromatic memories – the horse-drawn carriage with its bounty of fresh water, the elegantly attired gentlemen lost in conversation and the shepherdess tending to her flock of sheep. 

The sea and its dualities

One of the first mental images that are summoned when one talks about islands, especially small islands like ours, is the surrounding sea. There is a duality that characterises this body of water, the Mediterranean Sea. It surrounds us, cocoons us, provides us with its bounty of fish that is the livelihood of our fishermen.

 

Yet, it maroons us from the outside world at times, stifling us through a closeted small-island mentality. Our history depends on it as it was the playground for most of the empires and rulers that governed us and colonised us. However, these colonisers improved our country in myriad ways, through art, architecture, language, mercantile ability and other factors, even warfare. 

The Schranz and the Gianni families of 19th-century artists, as well as Vincenzo Esposito in the early decades of the 20th century, devoted most of their oeuvre to seascapes and the flotilla in which Valletta’s Grand Harbour featured many times. Xatt il-Marsa and Pinto Wharf are integral parts of the Grand Harbour, the backdrop of epochal events that shaped our country’s biography. In these two paintings, Piscopo explores our country’s artistic heritage in the seascape genre by reinterpreting it as a deconstructed memory. 

Remembrance and nostalgia

Marcel Proust, the French author of the literary masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, claimed that “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were”. Piscopo’s collection of 13 paintings is essentially about this, our memory of the past, deconstructed and afterwards reconstructed into new narratives. Historical documented past merges with our 21st century perspective of it, preconceptions, longings and all. It is this new alternative that the Maltese artist presents to us.

Forgotten Malta runs at Cavalieri Art Hotel of St Julian’s until mid-December.