A solo exhibition by Nicole Debono is opening at the Malta Society of Arts in Valletta on Thursday.
Visions Are Seldom What They Seem, curated by Rachelle Bezzina, brings together paintings alongside related object-based pieces, to examine the instability of memory and the politics of domestic space, where intimacy can function as both shelter and precarity.
Developed over a quietly formative four-year period since Debono’s last solo show, Lost in the Ether, this new body of work returns to the home as a grammar: rooms, hands, bodies and objects. Here, however, the domestic is not treated as benign. It is presented as a place where stories are rehearsed and revised, where meaning is managed and where tenderness can slip into control.
“My work begins in lived experience, but it is driven by the urge to translate that experience, so it can resonate beyond me,” the artist explains. “Painting continued to be my way of working through that emotional weather, by giving form to what lingers.”
A practical struggle – finding and claiming space to work – became a conceptual hinge for the exhibition.
Debono recalls encountering Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own during a 2024 trip to Bath: “On the back I read the line: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ In that moment I felt sharply seen… It was one of the events that set this body of work in motion.”
Working primarily in oil paint, Debono builds her compositions slowly and in layers. Her process begins with fragments – sketches from memory, photographs, remembered rooms, textures, fabrics and patterns – before evolving through drawing, collage-like planning and repeated revision.
“I work slowly and revise constantly,” she explains. “I let the image lead before I try to contain it, so the painting can hold a tension between what it wants to become and what I allow it to be.”
The curator, Bezzina, has structured the exhibition as a spatial and conceptual proposition rather than a linear narrative.
“The curatorial process was not about imposing interpretation but about sharpening what was already embedded in the paintings,” she explains, ensuring that “the work’s instability remained intact”.
Carefully sequenced shifts in scale, light and psychological register encourage visitors to reflect on how bodies, shadows and space structure perception.
Rather than offering resolution, Visions Are Seldom What They Seem refuses stability, inviting viewers to reconsider the domestic not as a neutral backdrop but as a formative space that shapes memory, visibility and power.
The exhibition will be on at the Malta Society of Arts, 219, Republic Street, Valletta, from Thursday to April 16. Opening hours are Monday to Friday from 9am to 7pm and Saturday from 9am to 1pm. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.artsmalta.org or www.facebook.com/maltasocietyofarts.
