Sometimes I feel like the Scarlet Pimpernel - here, there, everywhere, though never quite at the same time. This week carried me to Gallery 23, that steady beacon of warmth run by two mothers who somehow manage to make every opening feel less like an event and more like a gathering of friends.
The exhibition surprised me. Henry Falzon, an engineer by training, has taken to the sky - quite literally - sending a drone out over winter shores to photograph surfers from above. His latest exhibition, Henry and the Sea, turns those aerial glimpses into paintings. "Many of us believe that our bays and shores are only alive in the summer months," he told me. "Not so. There is much that goes on in winter as well."
It is an unexpected marriage of disciplines: the precision of engineering meeting the salt‑sprayed instinct of the sea. I don't know any artist here who has used a drone in this way before. The drone gathers the images; Henry translates them into paintings. The result is a perspective that feels both intimate and detached, as though we are briefly allowed to borrow the eye of a seabird. From above, the surfers and boats become small - determined figures cutting through vast, shifting water, fragile and brave, strangely tender.
What struck me most was how technology, so often accused of distancing us from the world, becomes a bridge in Henry's hands. The drone doesn't intrude; it reveals. It shows us the quiet choreography between sea and human, a dance we could never witness from the shore.
And perhaps that is what Gallery 23 does too. It lifts us slightly above the everyday, offering a view we didn't know we needed - one shaped by care, by community, by two women, Alexia and Rachel, who understand that art flourishes best when people are welcomed into a space where they feel they belong, meeting like‑minded souls, mostly artists and art lovers, who keep the island's creative tide moving.
The exhibition closes on 1 May. For more information consult their Facebook page or call on 9942 8272 or email: info@gallery 23malta.com
