I remember that day very well. It was around December 2008 when Giorgio Preca’s son, Massimo, walked into what was then the National Museum of Fine Arts on South Street. He asked about an exhibition of his father’s paintings intended to showcase the artist’s portraiture from the 1930s.

The project had been called off on grounds of higher expectations. The project was to be eventually grounded but my decision as the then museum’s senior curator was to take the conversation forward.

As long conversations followed in Malta and Rome, and contact was also lost too due to pressing matters and deadlines, only to be reinstated around 2017, Preca’s repertoire is now finally being brought to the attention of the Maltese public.

Preca’s posthumous exhibition had to wait slightly less than 40 years to happen albeit with a focus on a definite period rather than a retrospective proper.

Giorgio Preca di Malta ‒ that’s how he was known in Italy, particularly in Rome, where his international career unfolded and where he also held numerous exhibitions besides those held in Malta. Preca never shrugged from acknowledging his Maltese origins and is oftentimes identified as being Maltese in exhibition catalogues too.

He continued to visit the island regularly, perhaps drawn by the umbilical cord of identity that transcended his artistic production for years. Locally, he is acknowledged as a primus inter pares [first among equals] by the local artistic community and his artistic authority still is beyond questioning. 

Success came early to Preca, not only in Malta but also in Rome prevalently thanks, and rightly so, to commissions for portraiture. From this repertoire, those of Sir Arturo Mercieca and Lady Mercieca as well as the portrait of Grandmaster Prince Ludovico Chigi Albani della Rovere, stand out prominently.

There is much more in private collections in Malta that was known and which might have eschewed his identity as being prevalently that of a portrait painter.

It is, however, his post-war artistic production that single-handedly proposes Preca as the leading Maltese national spearheading the introduction of a modern aesthetic language on the islands.

His works and experimentations would have been appreciated locally by a restricted public of connoisseurs, artists and collectors and art critics.

At the same time, however, Preca was in touch with a Roman and Italian milieu which would bring him in touch with the likes of Renato Guttuso and many others.

His avid reading habits and direct knowledge of the latest trends in the art scene certainly come forward in his repertoire of the time but these do not seem to dilute his umbilical connection to his native land.

Preca did paint Malta’s landscape, albeit in a contemporary idiom, particularly during the 1950s. To this same landscape belong a series of paintings of Maltese folk characters drawn from everyday life.

Preca’s ‘inhabitants of the moon’ or ‘alien series’ is a corpus of works contemporary to this and a good example of the levels of sophistication his sense of Malteseness could go.

These are not just aliens merely inspired by alien sightings surprisingly on the increase after World War II. These are explorers of an island with an ancient prehistoric civilisation which also shapes and informs Preca’s very own identity.

It is, indeed, a connection which becomes more tenuous and articulated within the broader remit of Preca’s repertoire. In a sense, these are aliens much like the artist himself, irrespective of whether this means living in a foreign land or being alien to a context albeit tied to it by birth and identity.

Locally, he is acknowledged as a ‘primus inter pares’ [first among equals] by the local artistic community and his artistic authority still is beyond questioning

Preca’s post-war repertoire is distinctive in many ways. It might perhaps come across as a stylistic break from his 1930s artistic production but nevertheless standing for continuity in the search for synthesis and the essential.

This also comes across in the choice of titles for his works listed in successive exhibition catalogues. Preca was continuously in search of a language of formal qualities which is far removed from the representational.

Sometimes it is just a ceramic piece, a parrot or his son, Massimo, who is the sitter for the painting entitled Young Boy Reading in an Armchair exhibited at the Commonwealth Institute and at the Galleria d’Arte delle Esposizioni in Rome in the same year (1966).

On other occasions, it would be the view outside his studio which I remember visiting in 2017 when his colour-smudged lab coat still hung on his easel then still in place. More often than not, the handling of paint in his post-World War II works is essentially guided by drawing executed with an extraordinary surety of hand.

Indeed, some of Preca’s paintings of this period can also be read as coloured drawings in their own right, combining line and colour in an abstract expressionist way, also acknowledged as a style in the title of his double self-portrait.

Pigment informs flat colours, also sketchy, but occasionally thickens to acquire a structured texture as in the case of some of his still-life production. As time goes by, his use of bold primary colours, occasionally luminous and reminiscent of those featured on the traditional Maltese dgħajsa, provide an increasing contrast with a darker palette dominated by black which spreads beyond the line to shape volume and provide a sense of tangible weight.

Preca’s reading of identity is subtle and sophisticated, personal yet contemporary. His repertoire is far more advanced than anything comparable to what was happening locally. Indeed, Preca’s Malta stands for who he is, but not the boundary holding him back from moving forward and exploring ways and means how his artistic career would unfold.

If there is an objective to underpin behind this effort, I would choose to acknowledge Preca as Maltese through and through yet, and paradoxically so, his repertoire is beyond being Maltese, albeit part and parcel of Maltese post-war art history. It is a history that is now much more articulate and informed as some ‒ but far from all ‒ of the missing jigsaw pieces have begun to fall into place.

Giorgio Preca (1909 – 1984) ta’ Malta: An International Artist with a Modern Spirit, hosted by MUŻA, runs until February 27, 2022. Opening hours are from Monday to Sunday between 10am and 4.30pm. COVID-19 restrictions apply.

Note: The author confirms that his involvement with the Preca exhibition currently on at MUŻA concerns the original concept and a curated choice/selection of artworks around which the current exhibition and digital experience was developed. The curatorial remit of this exhibition was renounced by the author in September 2021 for reasons beyond the scope and purpose of this contribution.