The untimely death, in 2010, of artist Isabelle Borg, at just 51 years of age, deprived the Maltese art scene of an original protagonist who explored myriad themes, some of which in rather unconventional ways.

Besides leading a very active artistic life, she was publicly very vociferous and spoke against female injustice by setting up, in the late 1980s, Moviment Mara Maltija (Maltese woman’s movement).

Her art demonstrated an unconditional love for Malta. She used to live in Floriana, the Valletta suburb from the time of the Knights, abounding with majestic architecture and lush gardens.

Even a few months before her death, she protested against the indignity and the callous decision of demolishing a historical building adjacent to her home, to be replaced by a block of unsightly apartments that would forever alter the architectural fabric of the street.

The dust billowing out of the construction site exacerbated her chronic lung condition to which she sadly succumbed. A strong artistic voice was silenced prematurely before maturing to its full potential.

The retrospective exhibition The Streak, currently on at Spazju Kreattiv, explores the various aspects of Borg’s artistic output.

Borg grew up in London and studied at the Camberwell School of Art, which is one of the six constituent colleges of the University of the Arts London. Being thus exposed to London’s art scene, with its bevy of superstars, such as giants like Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, together with the galleries that promoted cutting-edge art, must have introduced the young artist to fresh and unorthodox perspectives.

The bull motif and the roots of the primitive

Even dating back to her student days when she visited Malta for her holidays, Borg was very proud of her roots and sought inspiration from Malta’s prehistoric legacy and the motifs encountered in the megalithic temples.

In the 1980s, the Italian movement Transavanguardia (Transavantgarde) was breaking new ground via a neo-expressionist approach to the art of ancient proto-Italian civilisations, such as the Etruscan one.

The movement originally included about a dozen artists, most of whom were Italian. The brainchild of Italian art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, the movement focused primarily on the artistic output of five of them: Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Nicola de Maria.

Neo-expressionism was a reaction to minimalism and conceptualism, movements that had taken the world by storm in the 1960s and 1970s. Transavanguardia advocated a return to figurative art through a reinterpretation and revaluation of mythical symbols that epitomised the language and art of old civilisations.

Borg’s famous Lovers in the Bull relies on this Transavanguardia exploration of ancient and timeless motifs. She transposed its aesthetic and ethos to a Maltese context, our country being steeped in its temple culture symbolism.

Borg was not the first Maltese artist to look into our prehistory with a modern sensitivity. Antoine Camilleri and Lewis Wirth, among others, were intrigued by these glyphs that had endured the test of time. The fat lady and the spirals are symbols that Camilleri sublimely introduced in some of his most iconic paintings on incised clay.

According to the late Dennis Vella, the bull in Borg’s paintings refers to the relief of the long-horned ox sculpted on one of the megaliths of the Tarxien temple. Vella hypothesised that this creature could possibly be the ancestor of the endemic Maltese gendus, saved by the skin of its teeth from the brink of extinction.

Borg’s painting engages on a number of levels ‒ the artist included a human couple in sexual union within the animal’s belly, thus creating an iconographical original that is open to interpretation. It could perhaps refer to the primitive and the sexual basic as different underlying factors of an ancient civilisation. 

The bull, both in tradition and pop culture, epitomises male virility, stamina and strength. The complex composition of this painting suggests a narrative of sex, roots and religion – three factors that transcend time and define us as human beings. No amount of conditioning or education will rival the basic and the instinctive.

Borg was very proud of her roots and sought inspiration from Malta’s prehistoric legacy

Ancient civilisations thrived on rituals and deification of animals, celestial objects and natural phenomena. Their iconography at times related to an immanent drive that also is the paradox of sex and death, Freud’s Eros and Thanatos. Borg was maybe trying to understand and relate to this quest for posterity inherent in these civilisations – the need of symbols as a ticket for their celebration by future generations.

An artist’s overpowering wanderlust 

Jack Kerouac’s words “because he had no place, he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars” tally with Borg’s necessity to get away from it all, even from her island home.

There is a pronounced dichotomy in the landscape genre in Borg’s case ‒ her Maltese landscapes differ in numerous ways from their ‘Irish’ counterparts. This could be a necessity to indulge the lure, the summoning to lands beyond our shores. Her paintings of the Grand Harbour area, where her actual home was located, merge the solidity of history, especially that of the Knights, the mercantile activity, with the soul of the Grand Harbour and its environs.

Her words succinctly define what these landscapes are all about: “It is these buildings, ships, boats and mechanical constructions that give our harbours their peculiar character ‒ even though the massive walls define their space.”

She carried forward the analogy to a long-held attribute of the Maltese people: “Like a harbour, we can be welcoming and open. Like bastions, we can be defensive, impervious, immovable and stony-faced. Though I chose not to literally illustrate this metaphor in a painting, it helped me to ‘personify’ the walls and to portray them as a living element of our city landscape.”

Her Maltese landscapes weren’t limited solely to her portrayals of the harbour and its environs. She transformed her palette when she painted the open Maltese countryside and life outside her domestic comfort zone. Ochres and reds predominate in these cases, reflecting the beaming warmth of the Mediterranean climate. She painted the transformative humours of the Maltese countryside and sea and their sublime interactions. Sometimes, she included figures in earnest conversation in these landscapes.

Borg’s Irish landscapes reveal her ache to be away from these shores for periods of time. She was lured to the emerald isle many times and to the breath-taking beauty of its dramatic landscape. The expanses of pure Irish nature are dramatic; she, however, refrains from being overwhelmed by the ‘greenness’ that could sweep one off one’s feet, especially when one contrasts it with our country’s almost perennial aridity.

The Irish landscapes are more fluid in composition, reminiscent of the approach that American artists Arthur Dove, Milton Avery and Marsden Hartley adopted. These artists abstracted the natural American landscape by bulging the compositions with repeated motifs.

The sun is a strong compositional focus in Dove’s case, sometimes set amid the undulating sweep of the hills. Similarly, Borg deconstructed the Irish landscape into its abstract qualities and, like Dove, was to use this for her geometrical abstracts bearing titles that at times reveal their conceptual origin from nature. She extracted these shapes into their empirical forms, evoking American artist Kenneth Noland’s search for pure form.

Using luggage to deliver a concept

Personal belongings are packed in luggage, thus providing connection to the starting point, the place from which the trip originated. The contents usually define the owner of the trunk or backpack, while they determine the gender of the traveller, the frugality or otherwise in the choice of essential items that have to be carried to a destination.

Borg was not so enthralled by the contents, rather like a feline, she was more interested in the luggage’s volume and concealed possibilities. These stand out like caches, echo-chambers of experiences and impressions.

The curator of this retrospective, Lisa Gwen Baldacchino, insightfully remarked: “Her baggage of suitcases may appear weightless, empty of all save a painted image inside. Instead, that void within remains well-packed, full to the brim, not with personal or material effects but with strongly impressed memories, some nostalgic, others transient.”

The people portrayed, even herself as a self-portrait, evoke a sense of spiritual detachment that one finds in the personages portrayed in sacred art. In Baldacchino’s words, “She [Borg] has created a modern-day substitute for the iconic portable altarpiece. Lacking is the quintessential gold-leaf background and a delicate halo capping her figures’ heads as objects of worship than of close examination.”

The Maltese art-loving public is invited to this retrospective, titled The Streak, to admire many more ‘streaks’ of Borg’s artistic output.

The Streak, hosted by Spazju Kreattiv, runs until January 16. Log on to the event’s Facebook page for opening hours. COVID-19 restrictions apply.