‘It’s All Paperwork’ by Melanie Erixon

It's allPaperwork Melanie Erixon

Curator

It’s all paperwork, but you shall see no paper. For those familiar with the term ‘trompe l’oeil’, normally used to describe paintings which are so realistic that deceive the eye, after visiting this exhibition, one might understand why I feel confident enough using this term to describe these sculptures, in this short essay. The works making up this exhibition are deceiving enough to seem like paper, but in fact the medium is our beloved Globigerina Limestone.

I am honoured to be curating this exhibition for Antoine Farrugia and the Valletta Cultural Agency. Antoine is one of my very best and loudest friends, and I have been following his artistic journey for the last 15 years or so. From being tasked to purchase his tools every time I visit Florence, to the privilege to be the first (or one of the first) to see each and every artwork that he creates and the works in progress. Unfortunately, I am also the first to endure the aftermath of the rare occurrence when one of his fragile beauties breaks up, at the very last moments of the finishing touches – basically I know too much about Antoine Farrugia, but I’ll spare you some details. One other important thing to mention about Antoine and which we clash a bit about, is that he insists on not naming his creations. I always feel that a title completes an artwork, but Antoine disagrees, and he insists that he doesn’t want the viewer to be biased in any way when observing his beautiful, sensual, abstract forms. I also argued that he’ll make some art historian’s life miserable in the future, for someone who might be researching him and his works will have a hard time referring to specific artworks. It also makes my life harder when I will be trying to discuss particular works from the exhibition. But worry not, we did come to an interesting agreement. In fact, we agreed that whoever becomes an owner of one of his works, will be given the opportunity to name the sculpture, which will be added to the certificate of authenticity and become the artwork’s permanent title.

Antoine Farrugia, even though an art lover since a tender age, started sculpting in his thirties. However, he evolved rapidly and exceptionally throughout the years, especially through the initial years under the guidance of Anton Grech, when he started formal training at the School of Art where he obtained his diploma in fine arts.

To understand better Antoine Farrugia, one must emphasise the fact that he hails from Mqabba (just like me). Mqabba is a tiny village, which comes to life twice a year, during the village feasts. Mqabba is famous for the manufacturing of fireworks – two factories which bring honour after honour to the tiny village – and for the fact that it is surrounded by quarries of Globigerina Limestone. This little anecdote about Mqabba is important, as we need to understand where Farrugia is coming from.

In fact, before embarking on the magnificent journey in the world of sculpture, Farrugia was a manufacturer of aerial fireworks – perhaps an art in itself, a very dangerous one. Indeed, it was just after a tragedy – a huge explosion at the fireworks factory - which took the life of Antoine’s friend and colleague, and Antoine himself miraculously surviving the day, that he decided to quit this route.

And then, the other most important thing in Mqabba came along, the ‘franka’. To be more exact, quarry work was already in his life, as his father and other members of his family used to work in quarries around Mqabba, but this was the moment where this love affair with globigerina limestone started and there was no turning back.

His early inspirations are evidently from Henry Moore and Constantin Brâncuși. His favourite medium is the Globigerina Limestone, but not only. Farrugia has produced works in marble, even Carrara marble, which comes with a long story – spoiler alert – summarized to the fact that he carried chunks of Carrara marble on his back for a long, long way. He produced large-scale works also in wood and steel. He took part in a number of workshops and symposia both locally and abroad, the one closest to his heart being the European Sculpturing Symposium in Fraunhstein, Germany, where one can also find a largescale sculpture by Antoine executed in Serpentine stone and Albanian marble, now public art. Another memorable experience was a trip to China as a guest artist, along with some fellow Maltese artists, who all came back with incredible stories and a special bonding in art.

Farrugia participated in a long list of collective exhibitions throughout the years including two participations in the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale and this is his sixth solo exhibition.

But enough about Antoine and let’s focus on the artworks forming this exhibition. As mentioned, I have known Antoine Farrugia, for too many years and I remember when the work and research on this ‘paper’ theme had started around five years ago, when the first four works in this series were born. A surreal feat of bravura in execution and making stone look so malleable and reaching the limits of the globigerina limestone. The series was ‘shelved’ for some years, while Farrugia explored other forms - more abstract and sensual – forms that he is mostly known for. But this theme was always at the back of his mind, waiting for the right opportunity to be able to showcase them in the right exhibition… and here we are.

The first four works which were executed earlier, apart from being hanging sculptures, are set on a concrete base and one can notice that the ‘paper’ part is not polished. There is a reason behind this. Only recently (almost a year ago), Farrugia finally managed to concoct the ‘magic potion’ which enables him to polish and wax the globigerina limestone and still keep the original pristine colour of the stone (which one can observe in the newer artworks). Normally, if one applies polish on this stone, the stone darkens and loses its particular colour.

The four hanging sculptures portray pieces of paper, almost alive, caught in an imaginary breeze, defying gravity. The only alien material is one real wooden peg, which is wittily used to ‘hold the papers together’.

A few words on the newer sculptures in this series.

First of all, the bases for these sculptures are lava, which enhances a deeper contrast between sculpture and

base. Farrugia has also used similar lava bases in his last exhibition XULLIELA BAJDA. A playful array of paper usage is being investigated in this exhibition, some more unexpected than others. Have you ever seen restaurants stacking papers of ready orders onto an upright projected small rod, impaling the pieces of paper? Well, here you have it, in one of the artworks which includes a slightly tilting stainless steel rod with two ‘papers’ stuck in it.

Of course, maybe more expected, a number of sculptures are showing a more classic ‘paper-pose’, for example, the scroll like duo of papers, masterly executed in perfect roundness almost reminiscent of delicate cannelloni ready to be stuffed with goodness. Another artwork attempts the impossible by having three strata of papers gently twisted on top of each other.

I hinted at Antoine to have some play on the art of origami. At first, he threw his famous look ‘are you kidding me?’ but he slept on it. I asked for an origami paper-stone swan. He did an origami paper-stone aeroplane. But he didn’t just stop at that. He created a spectacle. The stainless steal rod here is again an integral part of the narrative, a vision of an aeroplane suspended in mid-air, in motion, like a silent performance of this lifeless – yet full of life - aeroplane flying towards a place known only to Antoine.

I can say I am ‘the source of inspiration’ for another sculpture, which I shall refer to as the paper cone. While Antoine was working hard on this theme, I invited him to take part in a collective exhibition that I curated, which is an exhibition exploring guilty pleasures. Antoine kept insisting that he has no guilty pleasures (which would be very sad if true). So, I decided to share one of mine with him, i.e. eating three ice-creams a day (sometimes). He liked the idea and immediately started sketching (an empty ice cream cone). But a lovely thing happened. Being so absorbed in the paper theme, his ice cream cone ended up being a paper cone, which lucky for me, I could also include in this exhibition as well.

Another sculpture where the stainless steel rod is incorporated is showing a ‘thin’ strip of paper twirling over itself, stuck to the rod, which recalls a beautiful performance of rhythmic gymnastics using ribbon. But that is only in my imagination. As mentioned earlier, the artworks are untitled, and everyone is free to see what they wish to see in Farrugia’s works.

The beautiful photos in this catalogue, taken by Andrew E. Zarb, capture these sculptures in incredible ways and angles. However, I think one must see them with his/her own eyes to fully comprehend the bravura in execution and the delicateness and grace that these works emanate. Farrugia managed to give the Maltese Globigerina Limestone the attention and importance that it deserves, especially when considering how it is being replaced by bricks and concrete nowadays.

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The Curator

Melanie Erixon

Melanie Erixon holds a BA (Hons) in History of Art (Malta) and read for an MA in Museum & Heritage Management (Newcastle). She also attended various courses in curation at the Sotheby’s Art Institute.

She was part of the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale team for two editions, under the artistic direction of Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci. She produced and presented two radio show series on Campus FM, one about the Mdina Biennale, titled ‘Culture Vulture’ and the other one ‘Savoir Faire’ which tackled the subject of Design.

Her first experiences with exhibition curation were at STUDIO 104 (today DESKO), in Valletta, where she cocurated various exhibitions as part of her internship, with Michelle Morrissey.

From 2015 to 2018, she was the coordinator of the Strada Stretta Concept - a project under the auspices of the Valletta 2018 Foundation - where she oversaw around ninety cultural events throughout the years, including operas, fashion shows, concerts, poetry evenings, lectures, art exhibitions and theatre.

Erixon is the founder of the online gallery Art Sweven, which also provides a curation service. She is a freelance curator and currently also the resident curator at Il-Kamra ta’ Fuq, in Mqabba, where art exhibitions are hosted monthly. Erixon is extremely passionate about art and is also an avid collector of contemporary Maltese art.

The sculptor as a model of his passion

Gérard-Georges Lemaire

Art Critic

An artist does not borrow a “material”, but seeks a synthesis of many limestone material components, and makes them his own, or rather, he sculpts them in a shape that is only apparently abstract, without this containing an image of the external world: it makes it become an expression of its form.

The expression of these volumes are data, harmonies and plastic information that the viewer must grasp as reactions of the Maltese limestone, always combined with expression.

There could be many readings, interpretations that we find in the undulations of the sculpted “material”, but there is no need to “research”, our sensations should react in relation to the volumetric suggestions of the sculpture itself. All these forms do not have a scholastic authorship, they impose themselves, because they are the expression of the free thought aspect of our century, even of that strange previous “short” century, dedicated to abstraction, from Kandinsky onwards.

His choice comes from the ground, it goes up little by little, from a deep conviction, in this sense a “material” is not alone, but it is alive and accompanied by the form that suggests, envelops and seduces. Globigerina Limestone has a profound alchemy indeed. In fact, Antoine Farrugia does not abandon figuration, but reads it in a different form, modulates it and revives it as a dynamic model of his way of expressing reality.

He assimilates the primary, ancestral form, as waves that do not have it and have never existed in the “figurative reproduction”; he proposes them as a deduction, all drawn from the primitive art of spontaneous manipulation, where on the walls, on the rock stones when they were distantly drawn and painted the “undular” shapes of nonexistent matter, such as wave motion, like the passage of clouds, indescribable, but he borrows them today, and brings them back to the “reality” of his form, like sacred texts painted on the walls, passing unscathed from one civilisation to another, from one century to another, as if to extract its true forms identifiable with his passion.

But the primitive values of the symbols have disappeared, to make the viewer follow the path, through its light and its shadows, without ever betraying the aesthetic concerns, but all extrapolated from literary, anthropomorphic and aesthetic meanings. As if to say: my way of sculpting is in “perfect correspondence” with painting, even if painting does not need sincerity, but truth, as Malevich said. Free forms and shadows that carry in themselves their deep meaning. How could volume and form repudiate the surrounding real space, given that it is the conditions of their existence at different rhythms.

To give up on three-dimensional space?

It doesn’t seem correct to me, because the space-time of reading Antoine Farrugia’s sculptures is animated, even if