The Malta Independent on Sunday
Space, time and the self
Fontana and Caruana in conversation
This December, the Department of History of Art at the University of Malta will host an international conference on 20th century Mediterranean ceramics and the ways in which this medium was exploited to explore the relationship between space and time, inspired by the questioning of such concepts in Baroque art. Naturally, the work of Maltese ceramicist Gabriel Caruana will be of central consideration.
The Baroque style is inevitably linked with Counter-Reformation religious propaganda, lavish and abundant ornamentation, and a claustrophobic sense of space. In Malta we have grown accustomed to the spatial ‘noise’ of Baroque church interiors, but for some the experience may prove to be too overwhelming.
The chaotic surfaces of Baroque paintings, the agitated movement, fluidity of paint, and crowded canvases all appear to be spontaneous and accidental. However, they are constructed upon highly calculated geometrical foundations which pre-determine the final outcome of the work of art.
The analysis of Baroque art was transformed with the work of Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin who devised a number of principles with which to formally analyse Renaissance and Baroque art in his seminal study Principles of Art History, first published in 1915. He made formal comparisons between the art from the two successive periods in an attempt to understand historical shifts, meaning existential reformulations of selfhood, through formal concepts as rendered in art. Wölfflin closely studied spatial arrangements in compositions, the relationship between figures and their surroundings, and also the connection between the representation and the onlooking viewer.
Space and time have always been deliberated by artists. Although rather abstract terms, they denote the most tangible manifestations with which to formulate knowledge and ideas on existence.
In the twentieth century, the Argentine artist Lucio Fontana revisited the space-time relationship between the artist and the art- work. He developed a series of works, the famous Concetti spaziali (spatial concepts), which consisted of monochrome canvases punctured or slashed with a knife. These non-representational canvases were to investigate a number of painterly conventions and the creation of form within spatial parameters.
In his notebooks of the early 1950s, Fontana wrote that ‘A form (and in saying a form it is understood that I mean a sculpture or a painting) occupies a space … but this is not a means for the conquest of space … No form can be spatial.’ He wanted to create space himself by using the art object, as opposed to the Baroque obsession with filling spatial voids: horror vacui.
The concetto spaziale was also examined in Fontana’s ceramic works. He produced a number of decorative ceramic sculptures that were inspired by Baroque representations of religious subject matter. He did not entirely evade the question of representation; the titles of the work allow them to be recognisable. However, the deliberation with form and its intervention in space remained central. An allusion to the Baroque is immediately perceptible; movement, chaos, fluidity, and the element of the seemingly irrationally produced object.
The objective of the conference is to explore this fundamental aspect of Fontana’s work and to see how his ideas were transformed by other modern ceramicists, especially by Caruana.
Dr. Irene Biolchini, author of Le Faenze di Lucio Fontana, expert on twentieth-century ceramics and coordinator of the conference, writes the following; ‘The relationship that Fontana developed with the Baroque has been studied for quite a long time, especially considering that the first text dedicated to the subject was published in the late 1950s. However, in this conference the final aim is not to find formal similarities between Fontana’s style and Baroque vorticity. On the contrary, the conference will try to point out the conceptual and existential elements of this conception.’
What will be entirely new to the study of Caruana’s ceramics, and that which will add to the already rich studies published by Richard England and Bonne ten Kate, is the analysis of his spatial and formal preoccupations and their framing in relation to ‘the conceptual and existential elements’ explored by Fontana, his followers and contemporaries.
Caruana’s art displays an engagement with the idea of ornament and its translation within the twentieth-century context. The return to a Baroque spatial disorganisation and the interrelationship of forms which freely encounter each other is clearly visible. More significant is the desire to overcome spatial limitations, to occupy space, which, similarly to Fontana, is a declaration of spatial ownership. Art in the Baroque, and in Fontana’s and Caruana’s thought defines space. How they do so is rather different. This question of ‘how’ is crucial to the thematic purpose of the conference.
In opposition to the Baroque, Caruana did actually work spontaneously to repudiate the role of logic from the creative process. As Biolchini argues, the aim is not to establish direct formal links between the artists being discussed, the Baroque and theorisations of the Baroque as spearheaded by Wölfflin.
The Baroque will here be defined not as stylistic but as a temporal-existential conception that held resonance for artists beyond the periodical categorisation which restricts Baroqueness to a chronological timeframe rather than perceiving it as a reified liaison between selfhood, space and time.
Dr. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci’s essay The Live Tradition of Maltese Baroque was a first attempt at understanding Maltese Baroque culture within such existential parameters. The author delineated a number of conceptual positions which identified the manners in which the Baroque retains its presence within Maltese modern culture, a ground-breaking study that is in dialogue with current art historical considerations on temporality, anachronism and Walter Benjamin’s anti-positivist historical methodology. This essay was originally presented at a conference on Maltese Baroque held at University of London’s prestigious Warburg Institute in 2014, convened by Schembri Bonaci himself and chaired by Prof. Peter Mack.
The upcoming conference is part of a series of conferences held every December which task to analyse Maltese art and artists within the wider international sphere, bringing local and foreign academics together, and establishing a tradition for such debate. Last year, the theme centred on modern sculpture; the legacy of Rodin and the pioneering works of Josef Kalleya. The aim of exporting Maltese art was achieved as academics from all over Europe included Kalleya in their discussions on modernist sculpture.
The conference The Mediterranean Reception of Lucio Fontana’s Baroque Continuum: The artist’s legacy and dynamism in the Ceramic Arts of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, with a Maltese case-study: Gabriel Caruana, will take place on December 15 at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Valletta.