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Valletta Contemporary

Interview: CAESAR ATTARD

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Interviewed by Ann Dingli 
January 2025

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Portrait of Caesar Attard by Kayley Scerri 

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Caesar Attard (b. 1946) is a Maltese artist known for his contributions to Malta's art scene since 1969. He studied at the Malta School of Art (1966–1973) and was involved in influential art groups like Vision '74 and Atelier '56. Attard taught art from 1970 to 1995 and lectured in Visual Art and Art History at the University of Malta’s Junior College until 2011. Beyond drawing and painting, he explored experimental art forms, including participatory art and installations. Notable works include Human Pantographers (1977), Open-Ended Meta-dimensional Field (1977), and The Identity Card (1978). His later projects include Graphicon (2000), Searching for Caravaggio (2007), Tonguesgate (2013), and In Memory of Our Luminaries (2018). In 2021, he contributed to Matthew Attard’s exhibition ‘rajt ma rajtx – naf li rajt’ at Valletta Contemporary.​​ Here, he talks to Ann Dingli about a re-imagined show at Valletta Contemporary (VC).

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Photograph by Michaele Zammit 

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AD: The chronology of your work is interesting – creating a series in a finite way, and then returning years later to edit their meaning through re-making. Can you talk about the aspect of 'time' in your work, and whether in an art historical context there have been precedents that may have directly or subliminally influenced your process?

 

CA: In the preface to the catalogue of the 1992 edition of the etchings I wrote: “I had little or no thought of producing a series when I started working on the first Gospel drawing, The Agony, in 1985. The works appeared suddenly and quietly like an echo, the origin of which was almost lost to me. In a way it was indeed an echo; as can be said of each drawing”.

 

Not to disperse the set of drawings, I decided to ‘reproduce’ them as intaglio prints, the first set of ten produced in 1992, and by the time I made the second in 1996 I hid the whole lot away.  This summer a dear friend of mine tempted me to bring them back out, and I did so on condition that I challenge their lingering and disturbing presence in my life – a presence one might want to obliterate or erase, change or revise, re-interpret or perhaps assuage. 

 

The layers feature of the graphics editor I was using cannot be the ideal tool or weapon: my dated signatures peep through the layers transfixed in states and so, they are timeless and inauthentic unless challenged. ‘Time’ in these works should be the duration we perceive flowing alive between these states. How can one challenge one’s own authentic signature? One’s image of oneself?

 

Erasing the others’ work is relatively easy, as Rauschenberg did to De Kooning’s work, or the Chapman brothers to Goya’s, or Duchamp’s to Leonardo’s. The closest one can get to the erasing of one’s own signature would be the pentimento – be it in life as it be in art. Thus time, never stands still.

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Photograph by Michaele Zammit 

 

AD: Religion seems to be a central theme in your conversation around this show, both on a personal and dialectical level. This reflects our local, collective mental systems – even the most agnostic or non-believing island natives are prey to the foundational impact of Malta's imperatives around devotion, doctrine and good Catholic behaviour – to whatever frequency or intensity they are played out. You mingled religion's force with ideas of secular powers, surveillance, autonomy etc. What is 'religion' for you in this show?

 

CA: Religion (and likewise any belief system) is indeed a force directed to some ‘source’. People rarely realise that their belief sustains the growth and very existence of their religion. They also forget that belief is essentially human, and probably ingrained in the evolution of the higher species. But irrespective of whatever people believe in, it is how this affects them personally and collectively that is of the essence for humanity. 

 

The exhibition structure has three parts: the etchings each given a title, the digital prints which are essentially untitled, and the cancelled etching plates each overwritten with a word, as for example, the word ‘save’ instead of the title Peter Saved from Drowning: thus I suppressed the narrative which defines the sense of the image and instead I proposed a ‘key’ word that is open both syntactically and semantically. It’s as if I’m asking the viewer to refrain from referencing the text and consider ‘the word’ in all its connotative openness.

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Photograph by Michaele Zammit 

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AD: Can you talk more about the title of the show, 'Life & Passion', and why you landed on it. What happened in your life, and in your passion, in the then and later of the two sets of works you present?

 

CA: I am aware that ‘Life and Passion’ is a hackneyed title in hagiography (and this would include artists’ and poets’ biographies!). I would be very suspicious but also much amused by a biography about me. Like anyone else’s life, much happens between light and dark which, fortunately, a pinch of humour could turn into art. Deep down I still feel embarrassed choosing it – maybe, in this exhibition, I thought it suited the narrative spin under consideration.

 

AD: Finally, who are your artistic teachers? I see a lot of allusionary threads in your drawings, which give them all the more impact and accessibility. There is implicit learning in art history even with audience members who do not believe they are learned or particularly literate with images from history's canons. But I believe in the unstoppable pervasion of art into the psyche of the masses. Do you? Does it matter to you personally – how people understand your work?

 

CA: I had good teachers, but you can learn from bad ones as well! However, my classroom mostly was the world, in particular the art world itself, its history, its actors, its transformation and its trajectory.

 

It is how people react to, rather than whether they ‘understand’ my work that matters to me; as also their background, prejudice, expectations, beliefs and norms they follow which I tease out or provoke, hoping they get engaged in a kind of self-revisiting. I agree with you regarding the “pervasion” of art in the collective psyche. In fact, there would be no civilization without this wonderful undercurrent. In recent times the idea of the ‘meme’ has taken over, probably because it is statistically measurable.

VALLETTA CONTEMPORARY

15, 16, 17, Triq Lvant (East Street), Valletta, VLT1253, Malta

info@vallettacontemporary.com

General enquiries: 00356 21241667

Gallery Director: 00356 79041051​

 

OPENING HOURS

Wednesday to Saturday 14:00 - 19:00

Sunday to Tuesday Closed

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