The M3 fund-raising committee for l-iStrina is currently presenting the second edition of Stranihdm. This arts exhibition is taking place at the Main Foyer of Mater Dei Hospital. It has been officially inaugurated on 26 October and shall be running until 27 November. All funds raised will go towards l-iStrina.
The diverse genres of art, the different colours and forms, the contrasting techniques and expressions, made me ask some pivotal questions: What is art for? What is its purpose? And where does it lead to?
Art is the authentic expression of what is true and good. Art uncovers beauty to be perceived and appreciated for what it inherently is and represents. For Plato the basic task of genuine beauty is that it gives man a healthy “shock”, in that it takes him out of himself, out of his helplessness, even at the cost of immense personal suffering, in order to reawaken him by opening once again his heart and mind, providing him wings, thus carrying him high. In our present technological age there is a constant heartbreaking outcry for beauty. Fyodor Dostoyevsky intuited this human existential need a century and a half ago when he wrote: “Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty he could no longer live, because there would no longer be anything to do to the world. The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here.” Similarly, the 20th century French painter, Georges Braque, said: “Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.”
To what extent can art disturb and to what direction? The Polish poet, Cyprian Norwid, answers: “Beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up.” Beauty cannot confine us in the here and now but opens for us transcendental eternal beauty. In his ‘Letter to Artists’, Blessed John Paul II says that “in so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, the artist gives voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption” (§10). Therefore, the Polish Pontiff concludes that “beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence” (§16).
The path of beauty, is concurrently an artistic and aesthetic iter, an iter of faith and a theological investigation. The theologian of beauty, Hans Urs von Balthasar, initiates his great work, ‘The Glory of the Lord – A Theological Aesthetics’, by these powerful reflections: “Beauty is the word with which we shall begin. Beauty is the last word that the thinking intellect dares to speak, because it simply forms a halo, an untouchable crown around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another… Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. It is no longer loved or fostered even by religion… We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
When appreciating the various paintings displayed in Mater Dei Hospital will you be looking for the Beautiful One?
■ Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap