Solo show explores cultural influences, quest for identity
Christine X Art Gallery in Sliema is hosting Reflections featuring works by Norwegian London-based visual artist, Lina Maria Rincon, until April 25.
The exhibition promises to transport viewers to the vibrant landscapes of South American summers in Colombia where she was born, as Rincon masterfully captures the essence of warmth and idealised spaces.
Through her evocative artwork, she artfully explores the juxtaposition of cultural influences, seamlessly weaving together her Colombian roots with the European experiences accumulated over two decades.
A window into another world, these works are meant to evoke a sense of peace and wellness. Unlike the work of David Hockney and Matthias Weischer, two artists she admires, who often depict figures in their work that “evoke a world of spring and summer akin to scenes in a movie”, she prefers to depict idealised spaces with few objects so as to provide a cohesive frame for the viewer to enter.
Rincon’s oeuvre reflects not only a celebration of the vivid beauty of South American summers but also serves as a poignant expression of her personal journey in search of belonging after two decades immersed in the diverse tapestry of European life.
Over the past decade, she has created works for art shows as well as commissioned pieces for hotels in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
Her artistry has garnered the attention of private collectors and has led to the distinction of selling her work to the Norwegian prime minister, as well as to renowned cultural institutions in Oslo. Rincon’s work has been showcased internationally, with exhibitions in the US, London and Norway.
Christine X Art Gallery invites art enthusiasts, connoisseurs and the public alike to experience Lina Maria Rincon’s works until April 25, opening daily (except Sundays) 10am-1pm and 4-7pm, and at free entrance.
The editors of this memorable book, Joan Abela and Giulia Privitelli, have put together an extraordinarily detailed and sumptuous collection of some very high-quality articles by eminent local scholars on Floriana. The articles range over a wide variety of topics from architecture to gardens, to urban planning, to art, to ecclesiastical history, to food and music, etcetera.
Here, local history serves two purposes: (i) to commemorate a place and its people in a scholarly endeavour, and (ii) to link up local with national and global history, for Floriana is perhaps the unrecognised crucible where these three levels interacted in Malta.
To explore this city’s history is to discover the island’s modern evolution over the past three hundred years.
The Furjaniżi often considered their city as a type of Cinderella. But the key to understanding Floriana is to perceive it in terms of the tension between siblingship and filiation. Floriana considers itself Valletta’s younger sibling, equal in grandeur and sustaining its older brother.
The latter by contrast sees it as its offspring whose very raison d’être springs from it. This ambiguity is the source of tension and rivalry in the domains of religious symbolism and sporting competition, but also the foundation of their essential intertwining.
Valletta could not develop as the capital city were it not for the services and embellishments provided by its neighbour. Nor could it acquire its gravitas without the proscenium that Floriana provided. That neighbour in turn developed its own distinctive culture, character and urban form with its grand boulevards, its open parade and assembly grounds, its jewelled gardens, evocative cemeteries, and memorials that recorded the island’s role in modern global history.
For if Valletta is a monument to frozen European baroque symbolism, Malta’s Buda, Floriana transits Malta to the modern colonial and post-colonial world, its Pest. Valletta and Floriana: Malta’s BudaPest, and its Grand Harbour is shared fractiously between them, its Danube, bluer than the original.
Both parent and sibling: hierarchy and equality. This is the key to understanding the complex relationship between these two cities. Normally the two organising principles are separate, but in this case, they are inextricably intermeshed and from this derives their complex relationship. Now, there is one character from classical literature that provides an illumination: Oedipus. Let us recall that Oedipus is both a father to his siblings, and a sibling to his children.
Let us note that Floriana emerges as a relief valve for an expanding Valletta population and to protect the new capital. “Genealogically”, one could therefore argue that Floriana is Valletta’s offspring, its satellite. But from Floriana’s perspective, it is Valletta’s younger assisting sibling, enabling it to emerge as the capital of a modern polity. It provided both the spaces and the infrastructure for the importation of food and supplies through Pinto Wharf, food storage and processing, and the channelling of water.
Its fortifications subsequently repurposed as gardens, particularly at Sa Maison that heralded the romantic English Garden, contrasted with the strictly laid out continental ones we find elsewhere. In Floriana’s gardens, culture becomes nature and nature culture, in contrast to Valletta’s rigidity where the two are kept separate.
It offers curated poetic pockets in urban culture that austere Valletta lacks. Floriana also provided the island with its first modern hospitals. It was through Floriana that Malta entered the world of the modern administrative state, including its clerical personnel, while the three cities across the water furnished Malta’s industrial labour force.
Floriana remains Malta’s stage where the nation decked itself out to celebrate its independent nationhood, welcome visiting dignitaries and new currencies. Nothing more emblematises the thorny parent-sibling relationship of Val