Scratches and God, and some lines

Abstract

The opening paragraph to Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci’s essay throws one into the core of his complex art historical and theoretical investigation of Josef Kalleya’s (1898-1998) sketches. Starting with an assertion, it very swiftly (and characteristically of the author) seeps through dynamic, meandering conduits of paradox and unfettered spatio-temporal networks. He affirms, in dialogue with the studies of scholars such as Alois Riegl (1858-1905), that the “act of scratching”, begotten from the “immanent creative drive” finds its genesis-manifestation through the line. The scratch is the “mark-wound vital for the birth of the image”, which originated with the line. Line marks the beginning of artistic creation and of language. It is the basis of form, and thus the basis of the externalisation of truth. Truth is the ideal end-goal of the ceaseless quest for origins. It is the concealed unknown, different from a truth expressed about political actions and their human consequences, as seen in Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Guernica (1937) and in the Maltese artist Antoine Camilleri’s (1922-2005) Protest Cry (1960) in their reactions to specific historical events. This quest is addressed un-idealistically in the essay as a path which diverts to ruin rather than enlightenment – the latter being the eponymous historical period the calamitous consequences of which were felt in modern times. It is, therefore, a tragic quest. Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), Goethe (1749-1832), Shakespeare (1564-1616), William Blake (1757-1827) and others are connected in a tapestry of inevitable disaster caused by inquisitiveness that always returns, in different forms, to the assertion of original sin. Franz Kafka’s (1883-1924) Joseph K’s own attempt to discover the unknown cause for his criminal sentence led to an unheroic death (“Like a dog”). However, this unknown was defined by Kafka as the logic of the absurd. For Kalleya, as argued by Schembri Bonaci, the unknown is not defined by the absurd but by the sincere creative impulse to find that which cannot be comprehended. As Schembri Bonaci so convincingly shows, the truth-quest is not one directed towards heaven, and the ideal, but to hell, to the torment that Kalleya so vigorously underlined as the impetus for his creative necessity, despite the artist’s own belief that such would lead to heaven; heaven for him being not some kind of Catholic ‘there’, but rather oneness with a cosmic God. What Kalleya, and through him Schembri Bonaci, disclose to us are purposefully concealed philosophies of existence and consciousness. [Excerpt of the Introduction by Dr Nikki Petroni]