Times2 caught up with artist Ryan Falzon to find out more about the content of the show and what it inspired it.
What is the idea behind this project and this pairing?
In essence, this exhibition is about the nature of dialogue. But it is approached through a genre of painting that one might consider to deal with precisely the opposite: still life, or more evocatively in Italian, natura morta: dead matter.
What more can be said about still life? Are still lifes even relevant to our times? Historically, they were endowed with a moral or existential key, or displayed as markers of one’s wealth and status. Eventually they took on more of a documentary, even archival, nature—a record of being in space and time. But even then, still lifes, if we can call them so, still seem to be concerned with themselves, with a moment in time and inevitably with what remains. Is there space for the ‘other’ with still lifes, with what is even beyond nature, say, the imagination, the non-painted, the non-visible? Can still lifes be, then, a kind of witness to our inner silence, of what is not said or seen, and of our solitude: artists who leave images rather than words, who create paintings that come across as haunting witnesses or, perhaps, as hopeful ones…
When I was invited to be the ‘second voice’ of this project, confronted by the works of Giorgio Preca, these are the kind of questions that emerged. Preca is a leading figure in Malta’s modern art movement; his works respond to another era, to another geo-political and cultural context, to other worldly delusions, but also to other hopes and aspirations.
Although a major retrospective on Preca was presented to the public just around five years ago at MUŻA (Valletta), this focus on his still lifes, painted in the decades after the war, explores different artistic tensions that he was grappling with, between materiality, form, chromatic and symbolic expression. In the absence of people or of a narrative, his still lifes come across as deeply personal, yet remain elusive; a testament to that mysterious quality that has been a constant part of the creation of my own works. Is that mystery, should I say, equally in death as it is in life?
The title of this exhibition, ‘Still Life | Life, Still’ encapsulates the essence and points of convergence between Preca and myself. In our respective practices, the treatment of the object, surface, material and execution is strikingly similar. The choice of objects reflects a deliberate awareness, yet the object serves primarily as a pretext for the act of painting The form is rendered down to the essential, most often through a bi-dimensional negotiation of object and space.
Still life is a traditional genre that remains charged with vitality and relevance today, just as it did for Preca in the twentieth century. The nature of still life, or natura morta, is inherently silent and contemplative, carrying a subdued gravitas. Preca’s heavy impasto and sombre tonal register contrast with my own visual language, which draws more from German Expressionism, pop sensibilities, and the mediated glow of the screen. Yet beneath the chromatic intensity and densely constructed compositions lies an undercurrent of melancholy. The recurring subject of domestic gardening operates as both metaphor and inquiry, an existential approach to life’s cycles, fragility, and persistence.
Gardening is an act of care and sustenance, just as plants return this care by grounding us and offering resilience. This reciprocal relationship between human and plant becomes a mirror for the artist’s own labour, that is tending, nurturing, and ultimately letting the work take on a life beyond the studio. In this sense, the still life is not static but an ongoing dialogue; it is a temporal bridge between past and present, between Preca’s time and ours, affirming the genre’s enduring capacity to hold both vitality and mortality in the same frame.
How did you develop your works and how is the exhibition presented?
A curatorial framework, devised by Giulia Privitelli, draws out the shared visual and conceptual threads between our works—it is not quite about a ‘ready-made statement’ (Preca’s) and my response, but it echoes a bit more the natural flow of a dialogue: one begins, the other listens, occasionally interrupting with a question or clarification, and then finally responds. As the conversation resumes, memories are recalled; ideas converge and diverge, are modified, articulated, or take on a new form as they are explored further, but throughout, each artist (hopefully) keeps their own voice. Perhaps we will ultimately discover new nuances in our ‘voices’. In fact, the only time in which we have an ‘equal’ voice is at the end, in the last room, with a back-to-back work which turns the focus onto the viewers—the living subjects—inviting them to a quiet contemplation, in silence and in solitude.
Here is where the thematic tension of the exhibition is deepened: we, the painters—one dead, one alive—only meet now, in this moment, in this exhibition. Our works never truly coexist together outside of this. In a sense, this is not so much a ‘real’ meeting as much as it is a ‘real’ conversation, in the true sense of the word: it is a turning point to consider the artworks (and life) of one artist in light of the other.
Both Preca and I are studio-based painters, grounded in the discipline of sustained, solitary practice. My engagement with his work has involved a close study of his technique, material sensibility, and approach to the still-life genre, not as an act of imitation, but as a way of mapping affinities and divergences. Through this process, I have sought to affirm my own pictorial language, situating it within a lineage that acknowledges tradition while testing its elasticity in a contemporary context.
From my side, I will be showing 15 works that portray a process. Whilst the initial intention was to create a restricted body of work that was fully representative, with bold, contour outlines, the process directed me towards a looser approach to painting, where the graphic-like forms make way for subdued conversations between gesture, colour and material.
The exhibition walk-through reveals points of convergence between Preca’s oeuvre and my Plants and Gardens series, most of which were conceived specifically for this exhibition, not as direct responses to Preca’s paintings but as a dialogue that flows fluidly between tempo-spatial, aesthetic, and conceptual registers.
Some of my works, such as From Rome with Love and Bacchus, are an ode to Preca’s career in Rome, a city he studied in, and moved permanently to in 1947. Like Preca, I oscillate between themes in my practice, reflecting an Expressionist approach to painting.
Also included in this exhibition is one fully abstract work by Preca and one of my own, both evoking a reductive sensibility and a flirtation with abstraction, while acknowledging that neither of us can be categorised as fully abstract artists.
The preparation for this exhibition was a personal reflection and reconsideration of the positioning and stance of Maltese Modernism within both a local and international framework. The islands had, to a certain extent, an echo-chamber quality; thus artists like Preca, who worked between Rome and Malta for a substantial number of years, served as a vital conduit for the flourishing and maturation of the local art scene.
A treasured outcome of this process was the conversation with Preca’s relatives and the visit to his studio in Rome. Stepping into a space where one is acutely aware that an artist poured his heart and soul into that which nourished him as a human being, steadfast in his vocation yet sheltered in a world of his own, was a profound experience. The studio visit emphasised the fulcrum of this dialogue as envisioned in its initial stages, where the act of painting is celebrated as a transdimensional language. Art making, in this case painting, is a solitary activity. The external influences are examined, disseminated, discarded, else funneled into the art. Painting is a quest for understanding.
Here, I inevitably project my own current preoccupations about the state of the world, where the studio and the act of creation become both therapy and a personal sanctuary. The studio space is treated as a site for private debates, where one seeks to make sense of everything around them, bringing order to the chaos using formal elements and the rudimental materials of paint, brush, and a surface. The search for harmony and balance within a confined space of the pictorial field becomes a projection onto the external world, and this very displacement can generate a sense of frustration for the artist. Within the studio, the artist is a kind of demiurge, shaping a reality over which they have complete control through the chosen application of material. The finished work stands as a testimony to this process, an artefact with its own future trajectory, a witness to the process of making.
Considering the dialogue with the past that this exhibition projects, its setting at the Malta Society of Arts, of which Giorgio Preca was a member, feels particularly apt. The venue itself carries historical resonance, situating the works within a lineage to which Preca directly contributed. The curatorial plan is attuned to the architecture and atmosphere of the space, allowing for a thematic presentation that foregrounds the commonalities and points of intersection between Preca and Falzon.
Still Life, Life Still by Giorgio Preca and Ryan Falzon, curated by Giulia Privitelli, runs from August 29 – September 18 at Malta Society of Arts, Valletta