Gabriel Caruana: an icon and institution of the art scene in Malta

Feature /Malta / Modern Art

Venice 2022

RICHARD ENGLAND

GABRIEL CARUANA

An icon and institution of the art scene in Malta

TenKate Ceramic collection

Since his early days, Caruana mantled a strong cultural overlay from his surrounding environment, a legacy that was to be paramount in the artistic development of his later years.

Among Caruana’s earliest artistic ventures, we find several papier-mâché masks and floats for the annual Carnival festivities – all worthy of notice for their novel boldness, colour and jocular design. Even then, Caruana had already established the basic rule of following no rules. His work was always a visceral rebellion against convention, with childlike enthusiasm. Caruana’s art continued to demonstrate a sense of immediacy and spontaneity, typical of the artist’s mind’s acute, observational, and impulsive power.

During the 60s, the nation’s independence and the rich influx into Malta of several intellectual arts and literary figures, Caruana’s work soared to the forefront of the local scene. His talent soon elevated him to a master of his craft. His exhibition of used tyres, magnified bus tickets and other objects trouvés at the Museum of Fine Arts, marked him as the enfant terrible of Maltese art. In addition, the presence in Malta of personalities like Victor Pasmore, Sir Basil Spence, Desmond Morris, Ernle Bradford, Nicholas Monsarrat, Nigel Dennis and A.C. Sewter was to have a strong influence on Caruana.

More than others, the art historian A.C. Sewter, former editor of Burlington and Senior Reader at Manchester University, was responsible for guiding Caruana through this development period, introducing him into the international milieu. Sewter, and the British architect Basil Spence, were also admirers and patrons of Caruana. However, the most influential was the British abstract painter Victor Pasmore, with whom Caruana was to form a close friendship. Pasmore imparted further confidence and, as a mentor, helped develop Caruana’s approach and philosophy.

Throughout his working life, the essential core of his designs remained his ever-present love affair with Malta’s ambiences: the island’s azure seas and their scintillating subaqueous hues, together with the rich chromatic palette of local fishing boats. Yet his work also seemed inherent to re-echo dreamed presences of the island’s long past Neolithic artefacts. It appeared that what cradled the hearts of the ancients still nagged at the modern artist of today.

Often, I had the privilege of watching Caruana’s hands tune themselves to give birth to new work. Caruana’s effortless handling of this raw material demonstrates the bond between the artist and his material. As he weaves a thought and radiates it to his hands, the mass of clay, its inner waters later dried by raging fire, becomes an offering, and the work gains a meaning: its name is ‘art’. It is as if Caruana speaks to the raw material, “clay, be patient, I can turn you into magic”. Now firmly established as a much loved and highly esteemed iconic personality, Caruana is also acclaimed in international ceramic circles. Numerous examples of his work hang in several respected galleries and museums abroad.

I feel I must, on this notable occasion, refer to Caruana’s marriage to Mary Rose, later in life, blessed by two loving and en-ergetic daughters Raffaella and Gabriella, all paramount influences on the artist’s persona and his work.

Tondo by Gabriel Caruana, 2011. Photo by Raffaella Zammit

Some years ago, I sent a letter to Caruana, which I shall quote as a closure to this oration. “Using the awe-inspiring four

Oval Ceramic, 1990-1

basic elements as your tools you, Gabriel, shaman of the Arts, are able to obtain an even greater value for air than the freshness of its winds, donate to water an even greater magnitude than the gushing of its sibilant rivers, achieve for earth an even greater significance than the sunshine of its precious stones and extract from fire a luminance brighter than its radiant glow. From the baked, moulded, washed and fired material of clay you have, for many a decade, ignited the art world with a resplendent radiance. Your exuberance and extravagance of expression hold no limits. Together with echoes of the island’s cerulean sea which timelessly laps our now no longer virgin shores, there is, in your creative opus, a magical presence of a reborn spirit of all the stratified over-lays of our island’s history”.