Wens, Comfortable Silence is a solo exhibition by Rebecca Bonaci in which the artist explores the immense potential of the daily mundane, finding solace in the quiet rhythms of lives lived together in love and intimacy behind closed doors. Drawing from her own experience, Bonaci turns to painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation to reveal how the most profound meaning often resides in the smallest of moments—where silence is not emptiness, but a space of connection, memory, and belonging.
In Joseph Aquilina’s Maltese-English Dictionary, the translation of wens is given as “the feeling of peace of mind one experiences in somebody’s company.” In this exhibition, Bonaci looks inward, celebrating and recording the small clan of loved ones who nourish her. Rendered in loose, living colours, her painterly language adds a bodily thrum to images that depict a dreamlike world where men, women, and children live together in harmony amongst stars, flowers, and clouds.
At a time when productivity is prioritised over nearly everything else, Bonaci’s choice to depict moments of intimacy with no purpose beyond themselves becomes quietly radical, “offering a moment of stillness in a fast-moving world,” as she phrases it. Her work claims that fulfillment arises not through the ego-driven construction of self, but through giving, through relationality, and through an awareness of the other.
In many regards, Wens is a sister exhibition to Bonaci’s 2023 solo Ġuf, not only stylistically but also in its exploration of embodied personhood, especially as it relates to female experience. Heritage and connection to what came before—familial and societal—run through both exhibitions, and the preservation of memory has become a common thread in Bonaci’s work. Belonging, her images suggest, becomes possible only when we acknowledge the landscape of shared remembrance that holds us all.
Bonaci’s images have a dreamlike longing to them. They are drawn from real inner experience, but express an imaginary state of wholeness and hold onto a utopian desire for a world where a complete harmony between self and other, with family and nature, is possible. Her figures are mostly nude, without discomfort, lacking shame, because the landscape, the sea and the clouds amongst which they float are free from judging eyes.
In Wens Bonaci immerses us in her tactile, silent, and soft world. There is a dual energy to her work: the awareness that the world is changing, and loss is inevitable, but also a promise that by looking inward, slowing down, and focussing on moments with people we love, existential anxiety can be replaced by a deeper sense of self, rooted in the other.
“I hope that one day, when I look back at my drawings, they’ll wrap my heart in the same comfort I felt while creating them,” she writes. Implicit in her work is a hope, therefore, that the same solace might also reach us, as we enter her tender, utopian world.
WENS: COMFORTABLE SILENCE runs from September 19 – October 17 2025 at Valletta Contemporary 15-17, Triq Lvant (East Street), Valletta
Read more about Wens.