Cristian Sammut’s debut solo exhibition, The Universal Man, curated by Melanie Erixon, is a raw, unfiltered exploration of human presence through gestural, expressive brushwork. Rooted in instinct rather than intellect, Sammut’s work collapses the boundary between figuration and abstraction, inviting viewers into a space where identity dissolves.
Drawing from early modern human art, Sammut seeks to understand the need for mark making, the vital need to create and potentially to record existence. There are converging examples like negative hand stencils left in caves on different continents thousands of years apart that indicates something universal. It is this same impulse that drives The Universal Man.
A self-taught artist and an architect, Sammut is drawn to unplanned, unfiltered approaches to artmaking. His previous architectural work explored collective impulses for ornamentation, concepts that continue to inform his visual art practice today. His paintings are deeply connected to ideas of the shared human experience, emphasising the act of creation itself as a vital gesture.
The exhibition brings together two strands of work, the first of which are portraits of individuals painted exclusively from life. Here, Sammut strips his portraiture of identity, ego, and context. His portraits are not simply likenesses but archetypes. “They are not ‘who’, but simply what we are,” he explains. Through broad, gestural brushwork and fluid forms, age, culture, and personality fall away, revealing a deeper humanity: shared and ancient.
Alongside these portraits, abstract figures stretch, dissolve, and reassemble across the canvas. Limbs and silhouettes flicker in and out of focus, echoing the fleeting marks left by prehistoric hands. Sammut works in oil and acrylic with unapologetic urgency — smeared, splashed, and scraped. The result is a surface alive with movement and memory, where form emerges only to vanish again.
The exhibition’s title, Sammut explains, was chosen to suggest a merging of self with others, a dissolution into a collective body and a return to origin. Through this elemental connection, Sammut invites us to reconsider not only how we depict the human figure, but why we feel compelled to do so at all.
The Universal Man runs until August 3 at il-Kamra ta’ Fuq in Mqabba.
