After years of drawing the clothed human figure,

LAWRENCE BUTTIGIEG moved on to depicting the nude. His nudes are not afraid to acknowledge women’s sexuality but embrace it with vibrant light and a feast of colour. Miriam Galea catches up with the artist to find out more about his current exhibition at the Auberge d’Italie in Valletta.

What distinguishes your nudes from other representations?

My nudes are a search for what I feel towards the subjects – I am not indifferent to them. What I achieve is the result of my reaction to their nudity and sensuality. I avoid anything which may trigger feelings of abjection. The displacement from reality is manifest in all my paintings, through which the subject is transposed onto the canvas and transformed into a cultural artefact. These representations externalise and literally embody my innermost emotions because it is through the female body that my intangible emotions are given a concrete form.

What led you to move from painting clothed figures to nudes?

I have always been interested in the representation of people and around the year 2000 this interest was complemented by an exploration of the female nude. I felt it was time to focus on the female form stripped down to its lowest common characteristic, the naked body. At that time I also started reading texts by female writers such as Lynda Nead, Elizabeth Grosz and Camille Paglia who gave me a different insight to the female body.

The implications of the nude are wider ranging, and so more interesting, than those of a clothed subject. The bareness of the body can be a source of anything between deep pleasure and trauma. To many people nakedness means humiliation, discomfort or exposure but to others it is a way of expressing one’s sexuality. In the nude, the body regains its potential of direct expression. This is what I am after at present.

Do you have any particular painting process?

I am very meticulous in my work. At any particular time I am usually working on around five to eight different paintings and I try to sketch and draw as much as possiblea as it is a means of training the eye to concentrate on the essential qualities of the subject. Besides allowing me to familiarise myself with the model’s body, sketching is also a search for the qualities which constitute personality. Throughout my encounters with the model I assess my own reactions to her nudity and observe how she relates to her nakedness when shared with others.

My approach is not a detached one focusing solely on the body’s anatomical structure, but a search for the subjective and the sensual. Each work, with its luminous imagery, becomes a sensitive and emotionally charged body built out of layer upon layer of oil paint. From up close, the paint surface is an abstract kaleidoscope of colours which at a distance optically blend into coherent forms to gain their realism.

What goes on through your mind while you are working?

Each work is a means of gaining greater insights into the model’s psyche through the pictorial representation of her body – a journey into the intangible inner feelings through physical corporeality, mind through matter, so as to say.

Why are you so fascinated with the female body?

Because painting the female nude is so challenging. It is a search in the limits of “acceptable” sexuality. If those limits are transgressed, the boundaries between the erotic and the pornographic can become blurred. While the female body may be the noblest subject in art, it may lose its respectability and shift into the pornographic.

Each work has been an opportunity to delve deeper into the personality of these women, through which I empathise with them.

You talk of contemporary nudes, unlike more traditional nudes in which boundaries are set and sex has its customary place in the scheme of things. You seem to be addressing what it means to be a sexual human being. Is this so?

I am after the sensuality which is embodied in healthy, contemporary women who are proud of themselves and their bodies. In this exhibition, I am also showing two nudes of a pregnant woman – a tribute to the female body’s potential of creating life.

My work has to be assessed in the local context. Here the establishment is completely intolerant towards public nudity, while the practice of alternative forms of sexuality is regarded as morally deviant behaviour. My work is not set out deliberately to provoke, but my paintings may be regarded as transgressive – a result of our country’s insularity, typical of small island states.

Ambiguity is also ever present in my work, an essential element which spices up the iconography and a means by which to challenge any self-righteousness and moral condescension which the viewer might have.

For your paintings, you constantly use models. What kind of relationship do you have as an artist with your model?

A working relationship based on mutual trust and respect. Rather than being subservient to the process of representation, the model must be capable of motivating the artistic process itself.