Globigerina limestone, in a country severely lacking in natural resources, is a material that is a building block of the islands themselves, besides providing the basic material for the construction industry. Extracting it causes huge blemishes in our arid countryside, the quarries standing out like gigantic pockmarks.

English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was posted on the Maltese islands for two years on official duties for the British Empire, was overwhelmed by the country’s dependence on the limestone that was quarried for use in the buildings that constituted our cities, towns and villages.

Love Obsessed

The material is soft, full of fossils and can be severely affected and degraded by meteorological conditions, especially wind and rain. The salt in seawater also crystallises on the exposed limestone, thus causing further deterioration and decay of limestone structures, causing headaches for stone restorers to mitigate the damage.

The neolithic temples as well as the majestic palaces and other buildings, the legacy of the Knights of St John, owe their hue to the incidence of the rays of the Mediterranean sun and to the honey-coloured reflective pro­perties of the material itself.

However, this malleability and relative softness provides an ideal medium for sculptors to chisel away and ease out shapes and forms from its midst.

Greediness

Gozitan sculptor Joseph Xuereb (b. 1954) is synonymous with the medium, having made a name for himself with works that are modern, exploiting the material’s propensity for yielding to the chisel and other implements that the artist uses.

It is these monuments and, especially, the limestone artefacts from Malta’s Temple Period, that initially provided the inspiration for the Gozitan sculptor to start carving his own works in this medium.

“My rounded form and style originated after having started carving the smaller designs of the Thinking Goddess and the Anthropomorphic Goddess,” the sculptor says. This was years before his preference for limestone as a medium kicked in.

Downhearted

He owes his interest in these particular matriarchal forms to English archaeologist Marie Cla­ridge who, way back in the early 1970s, established Studio Gozo 20 art and craft centre in the Gozitan village of Għajnsielem. He heard about the work of British sculptor Henry Moore years later.

“In 1980, I was already carving in such rounded forms before getting to know about Moore,” Xuereb points out.

Amour et Tendresse

The eminent British sculptor once declared: “The whole of nature is an endless demonstration of shape and form.” It is a philo­sophy that Xuereb adheres to and which is amply demonstrated in An Ode in Stone, his current exhibition as artist-in-residence at the Phoenicia Hotel, Floriana.

An Ode in Stone

There are universal shortcomings that make us human; we are all at the mercy of greed, of solitude, of the entrapments of love. However, the sculptures exhibi­ted in An Ode in Stone exude a sense of calm, despite the travails of the human condition. Works such as Greediness and Downhearted display vulnerability, while there is affirmation, unity and concerted strength in Our Family, Enthralled and Amour et Tendresse.

In 1980, I was already carving in such rounded forms before getting to know about Moore- Joseph Xuereb

The Couple shows Xuereb straying from his usual idiosyncratic style of composition of intimate bonds of couples and families. He usually integrates couples in a sinuous serpentine composition. In this case, he decoupled the two lovers as separate entities, the burgeoning Henry Moore/Barbara Hepworth-inspired negative spaces threatening to consume the two protagonists into nothingness.

Enthralled

The artist suggests that finding comfort in oneself or in a relationship camouflages the existential emptiness that one can encounter when a relationship is over – a large hole that pierces and menaces to consume the body, besides its soul. British novelist Ian McEwan once said: “A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”

Freed from commitment, The Couple show discomfort and a more pronounced vulnerability. They lack the solidity of Enlacér and Love Obsessed. Their fragile and incongruous materiality can easily fracture, and any trial at juxtaposition of the two elements appears almost entirely impossible. There is no space for mutual accommodation when love falls apart.

Agitation

Thrilled and Agitation can be regarded as companion pieces − the composition is identical bar the presence of a disconcerting hole in the latter.

Thrilled suggests a positive sentiment, a wholesomeness within comfortable circumstances. In Agitation, Xuereb punches in the negative space of doubt, that hole of latent internal strife that could overcome all if left to fester into something darker and deeper.

Thrilled

The smooth sinuous humanoid forms invite touch – Xuereb explores themes of human emotions and relationships as heads and bodies contort and react to different situations. The lack of facial characteristics lends an anonymous but powerful dimension to the narrative, enriching the sculptor’s message with timelessness. They stand out like ancient yet contemporary votive figures.

An Ode in Stone, curated by Louis Laganà, is on at the Phoenicia Hotel, Floriana, until the end of September.

Our Family