Fabio Borg, who has previously held a solo show in Rome, is delighted to be showing his work abroad again this month, and he is thrilled to be represented by konsum 163, a contemporary art gallery in Munich.
Eight pieces of his work, created in his studio in Mosta with acrylics, oil pastels and pencil on canvas, will be on show with varied art by other international artists, Claudia Hassel, Klaus Schnell and Annette Frey in a collective exhibition entitled It Matters. And for Borg, it does.
“It’s great to see my work going abroad and to feel recognised and valued beyond Maltese shores,” he explains.
Borg’s expressive abstracted paintings are mental landscapes, sometimes bold and sometimes ethereal, yet all are rich and colourful with gestural mark-making, reverberating fields of colour, instinctive lines and timeless traces which hark back to the past. While they don’t have an explicit narrative, in each memory and feelings coexist and the results are dynamic with a sense of urgency.
A “painter of emotional sediment”, his paintings “resemble seismographic charts of emotional tremors: they do not depict events, but trace their tectonic aftershocks within memory,” says Gallerist and Curator Carsten Lehmann at konsum 163, and author of the accompanying book about Borg’s work, Tender Incisions − The Radical Nature of Softness.
“Tender Incisions refers to an artistic ethos in which gentleness is not weakness, but the deepest form of radicality. Borg’s work is a manifesto for inner truth, for emotional relentlessness… This tenderness is not soft. It is a drill. A sting. A memory… The incisions in Borg’s work are not visible − they are perceptible. They prove the body may heal, but what is etched into the soul remains,” Lehmann explains.
“[Borg’s] lines function like threads of memory, not newly inscribed, but already etched within us. We do not see his works for the first time -we recognize them. Not because they are familiar, but because they touch an internal archive: memories that never became images, emotions that never found words. What Borg summons are psychic ciphers – fleeting, raw, immediate – that appear before us as both echo and origin.”
“My goal is not to represent but to render an inner state,” Borg elaborates. “These are my memories, emotions and feelings laid out on canvas. I’m trying to represent life itself and to describe life: we have to live it wherever we find ourselves and in whatever circumstances.”
“I don’t paint the world – I paint the echoes it leaves in the chambers of my being.”
“The world is full of doom and gloom: there’s negativity all around us. However, I try to be positive. There is always hope and I’m always waiting for the rainbow when the weather changes,” he continues.
One work, In Blue Threads, for example, is a multilayered work in which bold blue lines stitch together terraces of sand, sage and heather hues. Borg’s strata evoke both the landscape and the “sedimentation of internal state – something buried within us yet rarely made visible,” adds Lehmann.
“The colour suggests depth, expanse, atmosphere; the lines cut, connect, reveal,” and “the composition’s horizontal energy evokes a mentally mapped coastline − perhaps a subconscious echo of the Mediterranean that so deeply informs Borg’s biography.”
Never an Easy Way has similar organic colours while other works – Contemplation, Echoes of Emotions and Echoes of Dusk – burst with different Bougainvillea pinks dashed on gentle rose quartz and charcoal ash and Transmutations draws you into grape, amethyst and indigo.
“Giving a painting a title is like naming a child,” smiles Borg. “You have to give it an identity. It matters.”
It Matters runs in Munich until August 28.
