AD: Can you take me through the exhibition room by room – how the series build up and what they represent to you?

STB: The idea was that rather than having one single theme, I would gather different series of works that I’ve been dealing with over the past two years or so and show them together. Originally, because the gallery is split up into four rooms, I thought I would sequence this ‘farrago’ – this mess of series – across each room.

So, room one would have been the gardens; room two would have been dedicated to the theme, Rajt Malta Tiħxien, a play on Herbert Ganado’s book title; the third room would be populated with Probable Headlines; and finally, the last room would have been the canvas, Everything Remains the Same – the reworking of Caravaggio’s Beheading. But eventually, we took a curatorial line of having all the works together. Again, in keeping with the farrago.

AD: I want to talk about your still-lifes. They give me a feeling of looking at the truth of collective Maltese nostalgia. By that I mean combining a patchwork of innate goodness combined with… something else.

The goodness is the blend of virtues that Malta uniquely delivers, like the constant sunshine and the climatic ability to yield beautiful produce; as well as its past – or dying – virtues of humility and uncomplicated making processes. The something else is those totems of easy comforts. So, the Krips, Twistees and Pom Poms that represent things that are unhealthy for the body, but are an instant balm for the soul, healing in a way that is familiar and emotionally exculpatory.

When you see a bag of Krips next to a bowl of fruit, you eat them – because they’re going to make you feel good, they’re going to make you feel like you, they’re going to make you feel like the scruffy, Maltese person that you are. Okay, so that’s what I mean by collective nostalgia. Does it ring true to you? And if it does, is it a metaphor for what home is to you?

STB: The local produce I often choose for aesthetic value. The first still-life I painted was Pom Poms and Pomegranates – pomegranates were in season, and we had picked some beautiful red ones that revealed their mangled, fleshiness once cracked open. And at the same time, when I go back home to Malta, I do fall into the nostalgia of eating Pom Poms, which have been around for as long as I can remember.

And then I guess I’m also talking about what you’re saying – about the local produce, these surprisingly wonderful fruits, which – for such a small island with poor soil, lack of water, and everything against the possibility of growing anything good – come to life so beautifully. So, it became about playing with this idea, as you’re saying, of comfort-generating food of our generation. And also paying tribute to a lot of these local fruits that soon may be gone.

AD: Moving onto your garden paintings, which are clearly personal and calming to you. Do you think these compositions are also a wider peace offering? A suggestion of solace to your audience, where otherwise you spare very little detail in critique, or attention to terror. You’ve explained that your gardens often include a reminder that there is darkness lurking behind the literal bushes. Is this intentional? Couching warnings within dense portraits of beauty?

STB: My work over a number of years has been critique, critique, critique, and I rarely show the things that I enjoy. So, I think the gardens were a conscious effort of me detailing things and places where I find peace.

But also, two of the big garden paintings are firstly, my parents’ garden, which is where I grew up, but which is also enclaved as this little nook of paradise beset within outside forces that trying to encroach in on it: cranes, washrooms, things around collapsing because of poor conditions, and so on.

The second big garden is Daphne [Caruana Galizia]’s garden, where I also spent a lot of my childhood, and which her sons too describe as a fenced-in fort, pushing against all the ugliness of Malta. No matter how dark the outside world got, the more beautiful Daphne’s garden became – that’s how they describe it.

That’s something which I really relate to. Living in a garden fortress, you’re safe in this beautiful space, but you’re also very aware of what’s outside. And that’s something bad, something unwell. So, are the gardens in that sense an escape? Yes.

AD: How did you come to your Probable Headline series?

STB: I came to this from being a political cartoonist, from growing up learning from my father – also a political cartoonist. From growing up around Daphne, from being surrounded by newspapers.

Every Saturday morning, I’d go with my father to Valletta to the Times building, which is now sadly no longer there. But I remember when the printing press was still standing in the 1990s. You would go to the reception, you’d be greeted, given your complimentary newspaper, and you’d hear the whooshing sound of the machines working. You’d smell the ink. News is something I still see and smell.

I’ve always had this affinity to journalism and what it means as a pillar of society. What now I’m very aware of, the older I’ve got and the more I’ve worked within it, is the politics that exist inside. The closeness the media has to power and the lies that can be told to manipulate society.

My work over a number of years has been critique, critique, critique, and I rarely show the things that I enjoy

Then there’s this idea of the newspaper, what is the newspaper anymore? Who buys the newspaper? Is printed newspaper really a viable business model any longer? So then, news becomes what can be read for free. It becomes the internet. And the most accessible media online are often titles regurgitating each other’s headlines.

So that’s where Probable Headlines came from – this desire to play with headline news. And mainly in the series it’s ecological matters, it is climate crisis. Because we’ve been rolling in this cataclysmic mode for ages. We just continue to go along with what’s happening.

I liked the idea of putting down fake yet probable headlines within pleasant or safe contexts – like a breakfast scene or somebody having a coffee or a drink, and then adding in emblems for humanity, for the beauty that we can have in simple things. But once you look closer, there’s this glaring headline that’s almost hidden. Ninety-nine per cent of the people I’ve seen look at them don’t notice them at first, but once they do, they recoil.

A lot of people are very capable of compartmentalising outrage and shock, especially in Malta, it’s a talent, it’s a survival skill. You have to put away these feelings of morality.

AD: Ethical acrobatics. Which brings us to the final piece in the show, and I think your largest work to-date. Everything Remains the Same: The Beating of Yuhanna. The piece compositionally refers to the Beheading of St John the Baptist by Caravaggio, but alludes also to several other trends in your own work – your sausage people, your cartoon work, the theme of news and its indiscriminate consumption, and so on. Where did your thought process begin with the painting, and where did it lead you?

STB: I was never very taken by Caravaggio's Beheading. I thought he had darker works, more striking, better paintings. And I think it was shoved down our throats so much, that my starting point was at first to take the piss out of its adulation. But then I open my sketchbook and started to study the painting – where things went, the relationship between the subjects. Suddenly I was looking at all this empty space – just wall and chiaroscuro. It’s a stage set, we’re the audience. And I started to change my mind.

So with Caravaggio we're dealing with a martyr and these aloof onlookers all around. The two prisoners are detached, they’re saying, ‘not me. It isn’t my turn’. There's only one woman who's aghast, screaming. And the idea for my version came about not long after the murder of George Floyd, and that entire story made me look at the way Malta deals with race. I thought about many deaths of migrants, or as they have been our fashionably called “third nationals”.

I thought about the murder of Lassana Cisse. The exploitation of this vulnerable section of society, treated as slave labour essentially for construction industry, food delivery, etc. So I decided I’d make St John a food courier, because they're essentially brought over to live in squalor, treated like shit just to deliver our fancy burgers because we're too lazy to walk 10 minutes to collect them.

And then in today's society, within voyeurism – which seems to date back to Caravaggio – the mobile phone becomes another tool of detachment to violence. So everything fell into place, as though the different parts of the painting had been digesting.

AD: I’ve been thinking about your decision to have this painting in its own room, which obviously is to build the climax within the show. But I think that its power is how it coalesces all the other themes that you've built on, not just for the show, but across your career so far.

So you're sitting there as a viewer, and you're enveloped in this capsule of time, of assessment, and self-reflection really, because you can't look at it without thinking of the simple things in life that you have forsaken – which go back to your gardens, your still-lifes, whatever you are unable to look at it without thinking of the excessiveness of our country. It becomes yet another reinforcement or understanding of who we are.

STB: People tend to ask themselves – who I am in the painting? The one woman I'd kept faithful to Caravaggio’s is the old lady screaming, taken aback, the only person mortified and yet still unable to act. It’s there again, this feeling of hopelessness, so very real and so very inextinguishable.

Froġa/Farrago will remain open at R Gallery, Sliema, until December 3.