Preghiera : homecoming in death

Abstract

This chapter, besides being a deep homage to a mentor aims, as all my previous works do, to elaborate further a novel approach to Maltese modern art studies by proposing a new methodology of reading painting: a multidisciplinary-conceptual critical approach. Previous authors have tackled Maltese artworks as separate, independent, unrelated monads, independent not only from their theoretical-historical context, but also from the seismic tumultuous state of twentieth-century analytical eruption that bypassed our shores. Such abstracted monads were not seen in relation to the overall universal development which includes a non-European facet. Scholarship seems to have forgotten that Maltese artists were dealing with the same questions troubling their foreign colleagues. With their corresponding successes and failures, these formed part of a larger, transversal, and wider conceptual artistic constellation.