Mediterranean Dreams is the title of KENNETH ZAMMIT TABONA’s current exhibition. He talks to Joseph Agius about finding and deciphering beauty, and painting it
Kenneth Zammit Tabona. Photo: Lisa AttardJA: The title of your current exhibition, Mediterranean Dreams, evokes an idyll, an imaginary world, a nod towards nostalgia and to the beauty an island life lost in the frenzy of so-called progress. The wayside chapels, the towers from the time of the Knights of St John, the different and pristine geographical locations in Malta and Gozo that you portray – are these cries of pain in the wake of the richly-textured legacy we are losing as a nation? Do you consider this exhibition as a memento mori of sorts? Or maybe an escape from the general contemporary mayhem?
KZT: I think that you are spot on; however I also think you are reading more into my paintings than I did when I was actually painting them, and I believe you have indicated precisely what I have been feeling subconsciously. We have destruction and construction in a state of unmitigated flux all around us, eradicating all that was idyllic and beautiful about Malta and Gozo; therefore, although most of the places are, in fact, imaginary, they can be nowhere else but here.
Il Montgolfiere del Sole e della Luna, 2021I choose pockets of landscape punctuated by chapels and watchtowers as seen through open windows; a style that the late lamented Prof. Fr Peter Serracino Inglott christened as fuoridentros. They are nostalgic poems about a beautiful island that once was.
JA: In the past, your paintings usually documented human social activity and everyday life in the days of what appeared to be higher society. Sometimes, this happened in the rich drawing rooms of palatial homes, at other times in places of culture like the Manoel Theatre. Was this a question of autobiographical honesty or do you feel that straying outside your comfort zone would affect your artistic oeuvre and your fingerprint?
KZT: Occasionally I still produce a Manoel Theatre interior or a drawing room with people in it, but the time for that has passed. The grand salons of my childhood and youth have disappeared long ago and have ceased to thrill, especially when letting my imagination run riot. There is always a bit of autobiography in one’s oeuvre, most of which is unconscious. And yes, my paintings are self-indulgent. Chinese porcelain is a passion of mine and is usually the protagonist of the painting, so I do bring in the things that I love most.
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 2021JA: Landscape and still life come together in Mediterranean Dreams. The still life aspect is reinforced by the lack of human protagonists, with the exception of a couple in a swimming pool in two of the paintings, an observant cat, some birds and people in different Montgolfier hot-air balloons, appearing to be bidding farewell (or maybe adjusting the dynamics of this vehicle of flight). Does this suggest that the human element is a tainting one and that today’s dreams need it to be out of the equation?
KZT: It’s a development I cannot explain. When I was younger, I always felt I was a painter of people. It’s what I enjoyed doing most. In fact, I have taken part in two Xebgħa Nies exhibitions and have found it hard to focus on the human aspect. Something just goes out of you. Who knows? One day it may return. Till then, when there are human beings in the paintings, as you say, they are incidental… footnotes inspired by Hockney’s pool scenes or Icarus falling by Brueghel.
I suppose that I must be an optimist by nature; at least on the surface, painting only beauty
JA: The urns are the focus in some of the compositions. Are these suggestive of funerary urns, maybe symbolising the end of life as we knew it?
KZT: Now that’s an interesting observation I hadn’t thought of consciously, but it could be. In times of COVID during which all these paintings were created, death was very much at the forefront of our collective thoughts. One paints what is around oneself, translating it into a style that’s recognisably one’s own. This is what I think must have happened.
Et la lune Descend sur le Temple Qui Fut, 2021JA: Flowers in vases are an integral element of the composition in other cases. Do you ascribe symbolism to them, maybe the white calla lily standing for the beauty of innocence and purity that is being lost?
KZT: I just love flowers and lilies and tulips in particular. In this case, I paint them because they’re beautiful.
JA: There is a lush, fable-like overpowering storytelling dimension to your paintings – gardens, fountains and all, a search for an unearthly paradise maybe or an earthly one that is no more. One can be reminded of One Thousand and One Nights, an intermingling of narratives. Am I off the mark?
KZT: It’s called galloping escapism. When one paints, one’s imagination gets the better of him and the result is luxurious extravagance to a ‘Never Never’ land that simply accentuates all the beauty that one has accumulated in one’s subconscious and more…. And more.
Swimming Gala, 2021I suppose I must be an optimist by nature; at least on the surface, painting only beauty; harmonious pristine landscapes, beautiful things like flowers and exotic vases, my cat in idyllic settings like gardens and drawing rooms.
I could never get myself to paint anything ugly but there are painters, many of them, who do, and transmogrify garbage, charnel houses and squalor into works of art. They are very brave. My paintings escape categorically and totally from all that. That’s why they are all Mediterranean Dreams.
The Rise of the Crescent Moon, 2021JA: One artist who comes to mind when looking at this collection of paintings, as well as your general oeuvre, is Henri Rousseau. There is an innocent harmony in the compositions, a ‘naïve’-like perspective that banishes the towers of Mordor to Dystopia. One feels that you do nourish hope, as an artist, which takes you off the beaten track of existentialist angst. Do you subscribe to this point of view?
KZT: This is a difficult one. Rousseau’s jungle scenes were once reproduced in an operatic production of Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes in Bordeaux precisely to drive the very point you’re making. L’homme primitif et sauvage is a noble animal… and all that. I am also a fervent Tolkien devotee so maybe I do hope that in the end the evil ring of power will be destroyed, and the towers of Mordor will collapse as if they never were.
The Qianlong Baluster Vase, 2021My paintings are an escape from all that. I create work that takes the viewer to a world of wonder and beauty wherein there’s a story in a Chinese Qianlong vase and a white marble bust of a Roman emperor over a garden gate; a world where the birds usually found on ‘willow pattern’ plates, symbolising the souls of star-crossed lovers in some Chinese fairy tale gambol in a Mediterranean sky.
The Montgolfier scudding across the light cloudy skies has no power to steer and moves at the mercy of the wind. Maybe that symbolises how, try as we might, we cannot escape our destiny…. Who knows?
Mediterranean Dreams, curated by Charlene Vella and hosted by Phoenicia Hotel, Floriana, is on until January 31. COVID-19 restrictions apply.
Filfa in the Distance, 2021