COVID-19 has mutated everyone’s perspective. What was regarded as mundane and commonplace suddenly became more intriguing and precious. Artists, who are generally more sensitive to human drama, in some cases have withdrawn to the safe comfort zones offered by their studios.

Madeleine Gera

However, there are others who transcend the negativity and transform it, via a creative effort, into artistic comments that are both autobiographical and universal.

Madeleine Gera, through her Twilight exhibition at the Malta Society of Arts, has embarked on such an enterprise; one which can be considered, at least from a thematic viewpoint, as a personal re-orientation that works on many different levels. She remarks: “It’s also a way of coping with a much-altered reality and, in many ways, very similar to everyone else’s working experience.

“Life has changed, and so many people are working in isolation. As soon as I realised how precarious the situation was, and still is, my painting became my retreat from the world. I was ruminating and painting about the situation, about my personal life during this time.”

The Entrance

The choice of title, Twilight, is enigmatic, but at the same time symptomatic of these last few months, overshadowed by the pandemic. Our schedules, which, since our childhood, we have taken for granted, the comfortable compartmentalisation of human social activity like festas and calendar events, even the forward-planning of something as simple as a family gathering, have been impacted.

For Gera, twilight is an ambiguous word as it simultaneously implies an ending and a new beginning.

She is an optimist and a realist when she declares: “Perhaps the way we were before March of this year is slowing receding into the past. Twilight implies the end of the day but there is also a new day following. We must be hopeful that tomorrow will be better, regardless that it’s not looking great at the moment with a second strain emerging in the UK and further travel restrictions just before Christmas.”

I was spending more time indoors, so my own home became a subject in itself

The Mannequin

Gera reflects on the inherent meaning of one particular painting and the importance of depicting certain details, like the intricate workmanship of a Boulle table: “Lemons on Boulle Table means just that, a nostalgia for a life that is happening outdoors, an envy for that lemon tree that is not affected by any virus that affects humanity and that can still get on with its normal life. The difference here that I was spending more time indoors, so my own home became a subject in itself. I felt drawn to painting things around me, observing their textures in a certain light.”

The Girl in the Red Coat is a very poignant painting that delivers a very powerful message, that of desolation while in a crowd. One can perhaps regard it as a self-portrait of the artist, in which the colour of the crowd in the background has seeped out, replaced by the sepia of anonymity and maybe latent mortal danger, thus making the solitude in resonant red even more painful.

Valletta Interior

However, Gera insists that she did not intend the figure in red to be a paranoid representation of herself being overwhelmed by a personal fear in the face of the pandemic. “It’s not a deliberate portrait of myself, more a depiction of us all as a collective. Being in a crowded place is probably the worst-case scenario, especially at the early stages of the pandemic when no one was really taking any precautions like wearing a mask.”

Gera endowed the safety of indoor spaces, her immediate surroundings, with pregnant introspection and solitude. The loneliness is tangible as one is at a loss, a lack of faith in humanity’s potential when dealing with a novel 21st century pestilence. The worlds of Pierre Bonnard and Fairfield Porter are evoked, and one wonders if Gera’s interiors are windows to her own soul. “Like Bonnard, my paintings have a certain stillness about them, like time is suspended in mid-air. This was a concern for a while, just wanting to pick up and get on with things.

Lemons on Boulle Table

“It’s quite obvious now that’s not going to happen. And, if we’re lucky, we can get on with parts of our life. Some of us are not that lucky. The body of work just evolved but I was paying close attention to what was happening here and elsewhere. If a front-liner were to paint their personal experience their artistic language would be very different from my own.”

The Mannequin is a very powerful painting that delivers a strong message of disembodiment. It hints at one of Giorgio de Chirico’s Uomini-Statua-Oggetto. In Gera’s painting, the pathos of this disembodiment is augmented by the portrait paintings that look on, glancing with diffidence from centuries ago.

A metaphysical, existential message underlies The Mannequin, Gera’s favourite painting from this collection. She points out: “It’s my favourite piece of the whole collection. De Chirico and Pietro Annigoni both painted mannequins as a way of suggesting presence and absence, as are the paintings in the background.

The Valletta Market Under Lockdown

“They are signs, but the agent is absent from the painting and only present by deduction. Everyone has vanished in a mysterious way and these objects are memories, substitutions we unconsciously make as mental records of the past. Disappearance during a pandemic and the mystery of death is what many of us have been facing and learning to cope with.”

Twilights are magical times of every day as the sun sets below the horizon. The air is filled with silent urgency as the day turns to night, dawn follows and life goes on. Some people refer to twilight as dusk. Despite the strange times in which we are living, we all hope to be delivered from this metaphorical perennial twilight.

“I am hopeful that the vaccine will save lives and that there will be some deliverance of sorts. But time doesn’t go backwards, so whatever normality is in store for us, it’s going to be different. Let’s hope we will embrace those changes and discover what is really valuable for us.”

Twilight is on until January 14 at the Art Galleries, Palazzo de La Salle, Malta Society of Arts, Valletta. Opening hours are from 9am to 7pm weekdays. COVID-19 restrictions apply.