As already discussed in previous writings, the artistic style of the Maltese artistic master Carmelo Mangion may be called prismatic-refractive, meaning that it portrays a view of reality through a diamond prism which not only reflects light and colour but even refracts and distorts light and form. Mangion's work evades any singular definition and reductive explanation. No definition is beneficial and sincere to this painter artist.
There exist artists whose mission consists of perennially deepening a singular idiom and subject: constantly encircling and digging into the same field and the same plant. There are others, whom Steiner refers to as bees, who opposingly pursue the profundity of thought and praxis in different fields, in diverse climates and in flowering variations, from where they may absorb riches to create artistic diamonds. Picasso and Mangion subscribe to the latter approach.
If, for example, we look at the work "The Valley" by Mangion and we view it together with another, example "View of the Sea from the Window", we immediately see and feel the incredible and poetic width that Mangion managed to exploit from his creativity. At the same time, however, we notice the profundity of a common link between these extremely different worlds which define the unified complexity of the work of this Maltese artist. Together with Josef Kalleya, another milestone artist, in both artistry and enigmatic quality, Mangion is not only today recognised as one of the founders of modern Maltese art (although previously he was completely marginalized) but he was also an active international participant in the messianic struggle and search towards a new and radical language for modern art.
He was contemporary, but not a passive contemporary, to the development and evolution of a new art which portrays a world and reality different to that which we became accustomed in the preceding centuries. This novel language not only consisted in the introduction of new subject matter in the arts (Mangion introduced in his art expressive elements of industrialization in Malta) but also in a new analysis within artistic language itself.
In this way, his work obviously disturbed, irked, confused the spectator and the traditional scholar. Yet times change and the artist, even if he is unaware, would in one way or another be opening up art for new situations. With his work, Mangion shook the way in which we look and perceive reality. He also unsettled the normal visualization of the period, and thus shocked our way of seeing. In other words, the retina, the eye, was forced the look at the world through new lenses. A harsh punishment. Society unfortunately did not forgive Mangion for his Sisyphean courage and vindicated him through quasi-absolute isolation; the same as was done to the other genius artist Kalleya.
The strength and even the severity of Mangion within his frightening modesty may be felt even when one studies the empathic relationship which the Maltese artist had with the masters of Art History. I don't think that we had any other artist with such great strength and fanatical obsession who created a turbulent continuity in his studies with the Great Masters: Rembrandt, Halls, Moreau, Cézanne, Rouault, De Chirico, Ben Nicholson and others. Mangion gives us a prismatic microscope which treks through the path created by these masters and the history of art so that our contemporary reality may become visible. In fact, the artist paradoxically coerces us into his exclusive world, and we are then violently tangled in the turbulent abyss of the modern.
Mangion communicates with these masters and beautifully with the admiration of an apprentice yet with a strong enough talent to provoke his artistic thought - his unique artistic thought - and thus he places his entire world directly in front of us. As I have already stated, Mangion managed to do this not only because of his choice of radically new subject matter, and even more importantly because of his introducing of a new language which for an enduring amount of time was grossly misunderstood. His confrontation of Cézanne's "Bathers" and also the series he created based on the works of Rouault are very distant from the Cézannism of another important Maltese artist, George Fenech. Where Fenech portrays and senses a gentle spirituality of place, of his surroundings, Mangion violently confronts and deconstructs.
Amongst other works, the series "The Methodist Church" is in fact a symphony of fantasy in its composition as well as in its harmony and visual musicality which Carmelo Mangion consistently manages to achieve. However, this is not all.
In this series he engenders a worrying analytical relationship with German Expressionism and even a fauvist idiom. He challenges not only the aesthetic philosophy of German Expressionism but simultaneously he creates violent alternatives to Sisley's (a French-British impressionist) subtle powerful works such "Notre-Dame de Moret" and to Monet's "La Cathédrale de Rouen."
Paradoxically, Mangion manages to attain a fauvist-gothic atmosphere to the pseudo-Gothic church in Floriana. And this is all achieved with great humility, yet also with an intense aesthetic confrontation and with exciting counter-points.
Another of Mangion's strengths is found in the form of that which in art is known as the ability of appropriation in the Deleuzian sense. Appropriation of various idioms, even contradictory ones, unified as one idiom. Mangion manages to achieve this without falling into the trap of valueless frivolity, as did happen, and is still happening, to many Maltese artists.
The talent of appropriating an idiom is a talent monopolized by the masters as is Carmelo Mangion. To appropriate an artistic and aesthetic idiom without having the necessary historical knowledge, technique and philosophy running in one's veins together with talent always leads towards the creation of mediocre, ugly and futile works, as we are unfortunately suffering today under a tsunami of rubbish which is consuming all ubiquitously. This is because of the fact that the appropriation of an idiom, whatever it is - modern, or baroque or that of the renaissance- one must have a baggage of talent.
Mangion's ability of appropriation is gladiatorial. The expressionist-fauvist explosion of colour and thought, together with constructivist ideas within a barocchial culture reflects his search for Nietzsche's eternal return, meaning the search back to the source of our existence.
Today in the Casino Maltese we may witness a much awaited exhibition: 'Visions of a Maltese Master'. It is a display which will remain open until the 27th March 2015. In the past very important studies have been carried out by Prof. Joseph Paul Cassar on the works and artistic biography of Carmelo Mangion. However, much is left to be done.
There remains much analytical critical and comparative study to be done. Much intellectual energy (and not only financial) must be invested for Maltese research on modern art to find its own modern binaries and to gradually develop a vocabulary, concepts and thought which may construct a solid structure of analysis of our art history in a Modern era.
Article edited and translated by Nikki Petroni