PITTURA PITTURA

Raphael Vella

Austin Camilleri describes his new body of work as ‘pittura pittura’ (painting painting). This intrigues me. What’s the point of repeating the word, of saying the same thing twice? Why stress a word that sounds so straightforward? Painting. Then again, painting. It’s as though the artist is unsure whether his audience has really grasped what he is explaining, and, without a single moment of hesitation, he repeats himself: my new works are paintings, yes, paintings. Not sculptures, nor site-specific installations, but paintings. Twice over: painting painting.

Of course, Austin’s Maltese (or Gozitan) intonation is lost in translation. In Maltese, the second pittura is definitely more important than the first. It proudly certifies the veracity of the first statement; it confirms that your sense of hearing is still functioning as it should be. What, Austin painting…again? And as we ask ourselves that question, we start to realise the importance of repetition, because there are so many implications in the act of returning to painting. Of course, there is a history of such returns to consider, a history of transavanguardia paintings and neo-Expressionism and even so-called ‘bad’ painting. Then there is the personal development of this specific artist’s work to take into account as we listen to him saying ‘pittura pittura’. When I first encountered Austin’s work in the mid-1990s, he had recently completed a series of large abstracts on canvas. Subsequently, he started to exhibit sculptural pieces and installations and it might have appeared that he would not return to painting on canvas. So pittura pittura is a way of saying that he wants to revisit this medium, not because he has given up on sculpture and installations but because a true artist chooses the medium that best suits his or her needs and ideas at a given moment in time. 

Yet, this time, it is absolutely essential that the second act of painting be more emphatic than the first. If the earlier work was a subtle process of ‘breathing’ delicate colour onto a canvas, his recent work is more like a violent scream or a celebratory exclamation. His earlier abstractions showed everyone that Austin knows how to whisper in paint (a rare gift); his new paintings show us that he can reach much higher notes too. He repeats the medium, without a hint of embarrassment, but refuses to repeat the spirit of his earlier paintings. Austin simultaneously repeats himself and says something new.

Well, not entirely new. There are vestiges of the first pittura in the second. He achieves this by reusing older paintings and masking whole areas of the surface with new layers of jubilant colours and forms. In his own words, he ‘contaminates’ his past, but his earlier, more ‘spiritual’ self stubbornly returns to the present to haunt a string of amorphous and erotic cut-outs. It would be wrong to conclude that we are faced with a barely disguised case of artistic nostalgia; actually, Austin consciously defaces his old self, seemingly enjoying every minute as he paints over muted abstractions, filling in odd negative spaces to inject a new force into the highlighted passages of his older work. To say that this is creation via destruction – an idea with a little heritage of its own (Tinguely, Metzger, Latham, the Gutai artists in Japan, Schwarzkogler) – would actually be a close description of his artistic processes at present, even though none of the artists’ works referred to even remotely resemble Austin’s paintings. This is not the kind of utter obliteration we experience in Francis Bacon’s aggressive destruction of his earlier work, discarding paintings as though he disowns them and does not want or need to be associated with them. Austin knows that we know; he knows that many of us remember his earlier paintings and would make mental comparisons anyway. So he juxtaposes two selves, a younger, ‘serious’ or ‘sacred’ Austin with an older, more playful one. If Rachel Whiteread’s House remembers somebody else’s residence by ‘expressing’ its negative interior and simultaneously destroying the positive form, Austin’s paintings generally express his own past positively by disfiguring parts of it, surrounding it with a negativity that, paradoxically, is bathed in brilliant hues and glazes.

This brings us to another related dichotomy, one that transports us to the roots of painting itself or pittura pittura. Austin has told me on several occasions that he is contaminating his older paintings with ‘Pop’ images of Mickey Mouse characters, absurd sentences, and painted versions of cheap pornography. He is particularly fond of the word ‘Pop’ and repeats it often, like the word pittura. 

When I object, saying that I cannot trace any element of the cold, technical and deliberately banal imagery of Warhol in the painterly qualities of Austin’s new paintings, he retorts: “But that’s the point!” Austin does not want to hide the fact that these are still – or rather, that they are above all – paintings: brushed marks and stains on a stretched piece of fabric that do not attempt, in any way, to resolve the problems of the world or even present us with some ‘complete’ psycho-biographical picture of the artist. They are not anti-expressionist, as a Pop artist in the 1960s would have been, because Austin deliberately mixes artistic genres and ideas on the same surface, creating images whose strength derives from the fact that the few recognizable elements in them are generally outweighed by a pervading sense of ambiguity. The ‘Pop’ quality of this work is closer in spirit to Sigmar Polke than to Warhol. 

Yes, this is painting, that old, rectangular, flat thing that people look at with admiration or disgust. The essential difference between these paintings and more traditional approaches to the medium is that Austin does not start from a white canvas. Instead, he scratches at the skin of his old self, rapidly building a set of images that are replete with contradictions. Contradiction is, after all, the essence of painting, this strangely beautiful form of art that translates the tangible qualities of the world into two, intangible dimensions. Why not? Austin reminds us that we do not need to ‘understand’ paintings in order to appreciate them. In a parallel way, one could say that we appreciate life without understanding it either.