Artist PATRICK FENECH is currently participating in a prestigious collective MACHT! LICHT! (Power! Light!) hosted by the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany, alongside many blue-chip artists. He talks to Joseph Agius about this project.

JA: Patrick Fenech used to be well known as one of Malta’s premier photographers. What brought on this change in medium of expression?

PF: It would be interesting to note that before I took up photography I was taught how to draw and paint by my dad and also under the mentorship of Esprit Barthet.

During my scholarship years in Italy, I also took up design along with photography, so my choice of media was always open. My interest lies where art and photography collide, and a lot of my photography work leans towards the genre so called alternative/contemporary art photography.

I think my really first breakthrough with using mixed media came when I was invited to join START Contemporary and the City Spaces exhibition in an old brothel in Valletta in 2002, with my work Martyrdom of an Ex-model; a life-size photographic print of a semi-nude in a black leather mini skirt and stilettos, lying on the floor surrounded by the red line marker used for forensic examination.

The print was then scissored out and pasted to a metallic sun shield which in turn hung on a wall with several metal clothes hangers. Before that, in 1997 I had also visited the groundbreaking and controversial art show at the Royal Academy, Sensation, which left a profound impression and changed my ‘primacy of perception’, especially the work by Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn. Now I am exhibiting alongside two of the original YBAs, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, who were part of the RA exhibition. The idea that I could use any kind of material to make art struck a major chord; and that, obviously, also includes the photographic medium.

Incidentally, in 2010, my first art video was chosen by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery jury in Washington DC to represent Malta in a curated show called In The Loop ‒ Video Art from the European Union.

JA: Exhibiting your installation, The Last Word from Paradise in MACHT! LICHT! with some of art history’s most important conceptual artists must be a humbling experience. How did this come about?

PF: This piece evolved as part of my personal show at Spazju Kreattiv titled Dis, during the VLTCC2018. I had invited Andrea Hilger to curate the exhibition, and in the following year, she selected three works from this show to be included in the Ostrale Biennale 2019 in Dresden. It was during this show that Andreas Beitin, one of the curators of the Power! Light! exhibition saw the Last Word from Paradise installation and invited me to take part in the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. So basically, this is the third time that this piece is being exhibited. As you said, when I later saw the list of participating artists I was gobsmacked.

JA: Your work takes inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which opens with ‘Man’s first disobedience’ in which mankind’s first parents fell from grace. Banishment from Eden and the divine retribution metaphorically affected all creation. Does your piece relate to this, to a damnation that was not specie-specific and therefore unfair? Is God imperfect and pathetic?

PF: I am very interested in the Romantic/Early Enlightenment period which produced so many great thinkers, artists, poets and scientists. Milton in particular strikes a chord with my ecological thinking, and some previous work I had done using composite photography, in particular the series entitled A Shroud for the Sea, some of which hangs in the American State Art in Embassy collection.

Milton in particular strikes a chord with my ecological thinking and some previous work I had done using composite photography- Patrick Fenech

I tried to identify a wider set of cognitive and contextual factors that reveal trends in the voices and resonance of the poem’s etymological registers and its environmental implications. In so doing, I myself become a passionate advocate for the contemporary relevance of Milton’s ecological ethos. What I also wanted to achieve with this work was to allow perception to grow beyond the categories of habitual experience, in the way we organise the world and establish categories. Beyond this, there is an interesting ambiguity of light, shape and form, and here the artist invites us to question the idea of consciousness and the shape of our perception.

JA: The Genesis story, which Milton expounded upon in his masterpiece, establishes categories and dualities – good and evil, light and dark, death and life, vice and virtue, form and ambiguity. ‘The Last Word from Paradise’ marooned us to a proverbial hell on earth and a lust for reaching once again for the doors of that paradise. Is there any hope of deliverance, bearing in mind the menace of climate change, pandemics and wars? Are the primordial virginal world of the Genesis and the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation two sides of the same coin?

PF: We need to remember the historical context in which Milton produced his magnum opus in blank verse, Paradise Lost ‒ the English Civil War and the installation of a new republican government in 1649, the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London in 1666; in fact, Milton’s life and career coincide with one of the most revolutionary periods of English history. Milton also wrote Paradise Regained in his bid to generate hope and reverse the damage done in Paradise Lost.

Patrick Fenech

Ken Hiltner, who wrote Milton and Ecology, argues that Milton anticipates certain essential modern ecological arguments that resonate throughout his epic poem as we discover that the poet is extremely concerned with the environmental upheavals prevailing in England and Europe of the time.

Mankind faces the ultimate paradox of having initiated the destruction of the blue planet which nurtured him and sustained the ecological diversity of life on Earth. As David Attenborough remarked: “It’s surely our responsibility to do everything within our power to create a planet that provides a home not just for us, but for all life on Earth.”

My main objective with this piece was to demonstrate that there are new ways of thinking about Milton’s representation of Paradise in an ecocritical light, bringing forth a burgeoning ecological awareness which is urgently needed at this time. Understanding the significance of Milton’s ecological thinking in his portrayal of Paradise contributes to our collective understanding of our culture’s changing attitudes towards nature and the environment.

LWFP pushes the boundaries of perception and experience (the installation has no sound) and lets the visitor to be immersed in an aesthetic experience. Beyond this, as I mentioned earlier, there is an interesting ambiguity, the ambiguity of shape and form, and to think about the way to disconnect between what we see and what we think we know about what we are seeing.

My next commitment is an abstract video artwork projected on a big screen to accompany a live music performance piece, Spiegel im Spiegel, written by the well-known minimalist composer Avro Pärt, during this summer’s Oxford Art Festival, UK, in June.

The exhibition, hosted by the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, is open until July 10.