Maltese art aficionados who are acquainted with the output of ceramist Joseph Agius have got accustomed to his largely monochromatic oeuvre. Along the many years of his artistic career, he has relentlessly resisted the attraction of colour in a medium that lends itself to colourful glazes.

However, the exuberance of colour can sometimes conceal the inherent message of a ceramic piece, especially in the case of Agius, whose themes centre around a rather monochromatic and unkind world of pain, disease, despair and death.

Agius at times compartmentalises and divides space into finite areas or little worlds that narrate part of a general story in a way that is reminiscent of American sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), who also ditched colour and favoured black, white and occasionally gold. Nevelson worked with found objects, wooden artefacts that she incorporated into her sculptural friezes.

Ceramist Joseph Agius

Having worked as a nurse for long years at Malta’s hospitals, Agius daily encounters sad stories. There are ones that have a happy ending when patients are released to go back home and return to normality and to their lives. For others who succumb to their sickness, it is the end of the line. Facing this human drama every day, Agius can’t help but cathartically express himself through themes that explore melancholy and introspection.

“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street,” Portuguese novelist Fernando Pessoa once claimed in his The Book of Disquiet, published posthumously. Agius sometimes uses metaphors as the springboard for his creations, the mental imagery concocted by the trickle of seemingly unconnected words kindling the embers of a composition. The literal contextualisation of the phrase disconcertingly evokes poetic imagery that Agius embraces and effectively translates into a ceramic counterpart.

It's All your Fault

Painting pretty pictures is far removed from Agius’s world. Mass communication rejoices in news from war-torn countries: dastardly acts, genocide, invasion, terrorism, climate change and the most abject human behaviour. More often than not, these stories headline the news on TV, the newspapers and social media; good news appears to have lost its newsworthiness in today’s world accustomed to dark foreboding. Therefore, the ceramist, besides the intimately personal stories of people lying in hospital beds, also explores the macrocosm of universal sorrow that contaminates 21st-century reality.

His current exhibition, titled C’est la Vie, can be regarded as Agius interpreting life as he sees it. One can also attribute fatalistic meanings to the French expression, much integrated into the jargon of many languages. It evokes a sense of surrender, a resignation in the face of events that are beyond one’s sphere of influence. After all, we are just mere cogs in the great scheme of things, as suggested by Agius’s piece Men at Work. The ceramist represents mankind as stylised caryatids and atlantes, lacking individual motility and freedom, stuck in a wheel that goes round and round, serving an inhuman goal. We are stuck in cycles that are so hard to break free from, to overcome.

Men at Work

It’s All Your Fault reflects on shunning personal responsibility. We shift blame to and shoot down anyone whom we erroneously think is responsible for our predicament. Finger-pointing has become the norm and we stagnate into a stinking pool of self-pity that belittles and forsakes us. The figures in this eloquent piece point their members, fingers, or otherwise, in all directions, perhaps finding fault in everyone and everything; the culprit accountable for their pathetic immobility they try to be conjure up outside the comfort zone of home or religion.

This is perhaps suggested in the piece by the backdrop of what seemingly looks like a classical temple or an abode containing the figures. A cyclical arrangement of these humanoids indicates a restrictive circle formed by family, religion, political affi­liation and other ‘classical’ entrapments. Shattering the circle could lead to some measure of redemption.

The earthiness of Agius’s ceramics evokes a sense of sorrow, loss and a spectrum of other human emotions

In Classifying, Agius once again opts for a circular composition and includes a found object, a rubber stamp and text. He investigates the scourge of categorisation, the facile distinction between us versus them. Through history, Jews and other people were ostracised and systematically murdered because of their roots and because of the pathetic belief in the horrible urban myths that the Nazi regime found convenient in order to justify its madness. Many Jews were rubberstamped into the oblivion of the death camps.

Colonisation

This categorisation, essentially a compartmentalisation, never goes away. People with a radical opinion or with what we perceive as outrageous lifestyles are often ‘certified’ by the public as mad. There is a diameter separating the two categories in Agius’s circular composition, perhaps indicating that the two halves are, in fact, part of the same whole, suggesting the necessity by those who are insecure to categorise, in order to comfortably rationalise their own insecurities.

In Colonisation, the ceramist playfully delves into the etymology of the word. He stacks the humanoid elements into a column-shaped composition, (colonna is Italian for column). He chromatically, and approximately, divides the sculpture into two, black at the top and white at the bottom. The white (European) colonisers are steadily becoming ‘colonised’ by the inhabitants of their former black colonies, through the ongoing migration from the African continent that, for centuries, had been plundered and exploited for its wealth by the former unscrupulous European powers.

Help

Help draws us in to the newspaper fragment that Agius has introduced into the composition. Daily news items are dismal, suffocating and hopeless while humanity complacently looks on and does nothing to change the dynamics of it all. He etches the word ‘Help’ in red, an entreaty for salvation from the vortex of turmoil proclaimed by newspaper headlines. We are stuck in a rut, figures going round in circles, never breaking the mould and accepting our fate as a fait accompli. The artist indicates a giving up, a helplessness that is overwhelming: One can only scream out ‘help’ for deliverance as a last resort.

The Msida Workers’ Memorial, the work of Maltese sculptor Anton Agius, (1933-2008), has been at the centre of controversy since the time it was inaugurated in 1980. The style evokes Soviet and Italian Fascist neo-realism; the family unit of father, mother and child proposed as the purported basis of society. At the time of its inauguration and many years thereafter, this monument was regarded by many as a celebration of Communism, especially as it was commissioned by the General Workers’ Union.

La Borghesia e il Proletariato

The ceramist, in his La Borghesia e il Proletariato, (The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat) revisits the famous Maltese landmark at a time when such Marxist divisions of society have become anachronistic. Society has redefined itself into other, alternative categories. The child of Anton Agius has grown up and become an adult in La Borghesia e il Proletariato and social strata have morphed into new realities.

The earthiness of Agius’s ceramics evokes a sense of sorrow, loss and a spectrum of other human emotions; however, hope and love can still be sensed in the monochromaticity of his world, if one looks close enough.

The public is invited to explore more of Agius’s narratives at Mqabba’s Il-Kamra ta’ Fuq. C’est la Vie, curated by Melanie Erixon for Art Sweven, runs until February 12. Consult the event’s Facebook page for opening hours.

For clarity’s sake, the writer and the artist share a common name but are different people.

The Fanatics