When I first saw Gabriel Buttigieg’s paintings, they slammed into me with the force of a runaway train.

It is difficult to write about artists who you had a personal and professional relationship with, but Buttigieg’s paintings became many things to me over the years, and after working closely with him some time ago, his work gained its own independent gravity in my imagination.

With Narratives for Postmodern Love, showing at The Splendid, Valletta, last month, a conceptual arc which began around 2016 has closed.

I first came across the collection titled Paintings (painted c. 2016) and was immediately taken by this series. They were masterfully executed, and each one felt like a wound and a world unto itself.

After this, Buttigieg went from success to success. The collection Saudade, shown in an exhibition at the Malta Society of Arts in 2018, produced a complex, dreamy world that wove myth and personal narrative into a nuanced set of affective images. This was followed by The Beach in 2019, and then, in 2020, a cycle of paintings, organised in three collections: Mediterra, Totem, and Of Humans Reptiles and Horned Creatures.

It was at this time that Buttigieg produced some of his best work to date, and at this point I had the good fortune to spend about a year and a half working with him as a curator.

At around this same time, Buttigieg painted the monolithic Agnus Dei, bearing the subtitle After Van Eyck, Rubens’ ‘Rape’, Raimondi’s ‘Ariane’, & Michelangelo’s ‘Leda and the Swan’. This painting is Buttigieg’s best ever.

It is confidently executed and fulfils what Vince Briffa describes, elsewhere, as the “mystification… of the social and the personal, tersely wedging between imagination and reason”.

If reason (or unreason) refers to the earthly realm while imagination alludes to something higher and more abstract, this painting sits exactly at the junction between the two.

But then, after Agnus Dei, something happened. Buttigieg’s work began to drop off.

From open questions to blocky arguments

His next show, titled The Four Seasons (2022) featured four large canvases, each unpicking the various mythologies and archetypal echoes around the different seasons as they occurred across literature and mythology. In these paintings, it was as if the swan in Agnus Dei was halted in its apotheosis and crashed back to earth, because they were overworked and packed far too densely to be coherent.

These paintings felt less like an intui­tive search for truth and more a flexing of intellectual and painterly muscles.

A focus on meta narratives began to predominate, and the paintwork became more layered, less brushy and more dense, the colours brighter and less subtle. In terms of content, the open questions produced by previous work turned into blocky arguments, collaged together from fragments, and references that began to feel illustrated, rather than reinterpreted. In short, the paintings became more about themselves and less about life.

After The Four Seasons, things got worse. Buttigieg’s paintings became filled with new energy – splashed paint, scratchy drawing, aggressive surfaces and an obsessive focus on points of impact.

The compositions, torn facial expressions and aggressive materiality of the paint flung onto the canvas began to radiate an apocalyptic sense of misplaced sexualising energy and angst.

These are all subterranean drives, we are told, as in his previous work – mythologies, emotions and Freudian refe­rences. But the paintings themselves feel too aggressive, the framing too voyeuristic, the women too much like objects, and the scribbled lines and half-drawn hands too telling.

It feels as if something slipped though the artist’s fingers, and the images come to rely more on an edgy and transgressive obsession with sex, lust and hedonism rather than a genuine exploratory intent.

Buttigieg’s work began to drop off

In the paintings from this time, I don’t feel the apocalypse of dawning truth; instead they are gladiatorial. They have the same impact as a bronze sword slicing into my clavicle because they have become about the spectacle of lust and suffering, rather than the deep content of complex human emotion.

Or, in other words, the paintings radiate a voyeuristic feeling of consuming pain, fetishising the darker sides of human experience, and objectifying (mostly women’s) bodies, rather than moving through the subject matter with the sensitivity of a painter developing a language which breaks open new understanding.

More of the same

And so we get to Narratives of Postmodern Love. In this exhibition, we are told, Buttigieg is firing on all cylinders. This is his most raw, most honest body of work, and yet the paintings are more of the same.

Suffused with voyeuristic energy, they make a spectacle of suffering, objectify women and pile human wreckage together in a terrible consumption of pain.

The word ‘postmodern’ is romantic, seductive, rolls beautifully off the tongue, but postmodernism has a cruel underbelly. Like the gladiator arenas, it is also symptomatic of the end of an age (the Enlightenment) and it dismantles human beings into data sets and interlocking power games that can be pushed and pulled around (just like paint on the surface of a canvas).

Postmodernism creates human beings that are uncertain of their truth and desperate for meaning.

The bodies in Buttigieg’s recent work echo this logic. His figures are vague and their defining characteristics are the pleasure/ pain points of impact that gene­rate a dissolution of self in moments of short-lived apocalyptic ecstasy. These zones are usually visualised around the genitalia and feature aggressively worked masses of dark paint.

The images clash with what we are told about them – “my work has a tendency to seem sexual, but in reality, I see it as anything but,” Buttigieg states in a recent interview; “rather, I see the artworks as a collection of emotions that crystallise in their totality during some kind of intimate activity [...] all I try to do in my work is glorify women.”

But the images in Narratives contradict this, most of them depict aggressive sexual encounters, and despite the artist’s intent, are outward looking, not inward. This seems to betray a plea in the work which is almost childlike: the desire to latch onto something – even pain – in order to latch on to an identity. The effect of these works is independent from the artist’s intent.

I am tempted to equate this with the wreckage left in the wake of a postmodern Maltese identity which is still struggling to find itself and is fraught with uncertainty, currently gorging on excess in the orgasmic crash point of the post-Muscat, post-Nationalist era.

I see shattered tree branches in Buttigieg’s points of impact and the gaze his paintings invite us to train on splayed bodies is the same that developers direct at virgin land, before rolling in with their bulldozers; his semi-transparent nebulas of paint bleed across the canvas like unregulated transactions across our borders.

There is a strange affinity between the aggressive, ‘consume-everything’ world view that has infected our island at the moment and the vision that Buttigieg’s paintings seem to betray.

Intentionally or unintentionally, Narratives has opened a deep well of insight into something radically contemporary. Due to how problematic the work is, we are drawn in by the promise of obliteration via hedonic impact, but also the possibility for identity-making via consumption. To call this love, then, is even stranger.

I confess, I am also drawn in. My gut is pulled to the images because I feel this same desire for identity, but at the same time my brain pulls me away.

My own thoughts are symptomatic of postmodern confusion, endless scrolling on Instagram, body fetishisation, consumption, maximisation, burnout etc., so perhaps, even though I cannot find myself fully in these images, I still see something of myself reflected back when I look deeply into their foundations, and because of their darkness and depravity, they frighten me, as do the conditions of our age and our identity.

Is this what love becomes in the postmodern age?