“There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath,” late British author Douglas Adams claims in his novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That moment of suspense, when nocturnal, velvety darkness slowly ebbs into the milky stillness of daybreak.

Morning Light, the title of Richard Saliba’s current exhibition, explores dawn and its aftermath, just before the Mediterranean sun beats down and dismisses the mistiness that shrouds the Maltese and Gozitan countryside.

Of all the 25 paintings exhibited, all recent works, the majority portray the idyllic and undisturbed Gozitan countryside. Cranes, monstrous buildings and the environmental defacement are filtered out by the artist to portray Gozo as the fabled island where time stood still.

In most cases, the silhouette of the church dominates, ethereal and steadfast, although menacing to dissolve into the background general chromatic fogginess.

The undulating fields in the foreground are a fingerprint of Saliba’s landscape oeuvre, pregnant with fruit of Mother Earth. There is a strong ecological dimension to the artist’s work, a sensitivity that yearns for the simple rural life that regarded the seasons as a constant calendar. One is reminded of the words of Charles Dickens: “Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.”

Another of the exhibits.

Human activity is reflected in the tilled fields, although the actual portrayal of the farmer does not figure in these particular Saliba canvases. The artist is maybe after a Turneresque interpretation of landscape, through a chromatic and compositional balance, an intimate one between the natural and the divine. However, unlike Turner, Saliba is after a quiet elemental balminess rather than stormy turmoil. This reflects on the character of the Maltese artist, who is a very soft-spoken man, not menaced by internal unrest, unlike his 19th-century British counterpart.

One immediately recalls George Fenech, the giant of the Maltese landscape genre of the 20th century. The late Mellieħa artist’s landscape oeuvre is almost invariably dedicated to his birthplace and its environs across all seasons. Like the older artist, Saliba is after a pantheistic visual representation in which each singular element sings in chromatic balance and harmony. Although not usually restricted by geography, for Morning Light Saliba focuses more on our sister island to bring out its poetry.

Fields flow away from the tiny church silhouetted against the vast, overwhelming sky – it connects the terrestrial and the divine

In his landscapes of Maltese and Gozitan towns and villages, the artist tries to maintain a measure of anonymity as regards representing specific locations. This steering away from local parochialism, much ingrained in our anthropology and sociology, delivers a general and universal all-encompassing message. Fields flow away from the tiny church silhouetted against the vast, overwhelming sky – it connects the terrestrial and the divine.

Mario Schifano’s Campi di Pane

Late Italian artist Mario Schifano’s Campi di Pane are essentially portrayals of sheaves of wheat, the grain then is grinded to make bread, the staple food of the proletariat. The Communist Italian artist was interested in the social strata of Italian society and how the ‘masses’ behaved. Being interested in social change, his ‘fields of bread’ depict the empiric and the basic as well as the essentially rural as a representation of the cycle of life.

I feel that, for Saliba, the seasonal cycle completes itself through a belief in the Mother Church and God. Wheat is cultivated in some of these fields and it is harvested to be ground into flour to which water is added to be kneaded into our country’s famous sourdough, a staple since time immemorial.

The undulating fields in the foreground are a fingerprint of Saliba’s landscape oeuvre.

The spiritual analogy can be carried forward as it is flour that is the basic ingredient for the thin wafers that the priest transubstantiates into the body of Christ during mass. Saliba’s landscapes portray this cycle of the rural, the spiritual and the divine as a way of life which is being rapidly lost on the heathen altar of so-called progress.

Morning Light is an invitation at recalibration, at exorcising the demon of materialism and meditating on what really counts in this age of excesses that has raped and disdained even the mythological island of Calypso, besides its larger sister island.

Morning Light, hosted at art..e Gallery of 1, Library Street, Victoria, is on until December 31. Consult the venue’s Facebook page for opening hours and more information.