In her own words, Eliane Mifsud describes painting as both a passion and a compulsion: "colour is my obsession... colours are the notes of the music in my soul". This evocative statement offers more than just a poetic introduction to her forthcoming August exhibition at the Bizzilla Art Space (Mapfre MSV Life), The Mall, Floriana, it provides a vital key to understanding the deeply reflective and emotional nature of her abstract works.
Mifsud's paintings do not attempt to represent the external world. Rather, they operate within the terrain of inner experience, where colour becomes a primary vehicle for emotional articulation. Her canvases, whether dominated by deep blues, vibrant reds, or luminous pinks, are less images than states of being. They belong to a long and complex tradition of abstraction in which the visible is subordinated to the felt.
Stylistically, her work may be situated within the broad lineage of Abstract Expressionism, yet it resists simple categorisation. The gestural application of paint, at times thick and urgent, recalls the intuitive energy of artists such as Willem de Kooning, where the act of painting itself becomes a site of encounter between control and spontaneity. At the same time, Mifsud's use of expansive colour fields suggests affinities with Mark Rothko, whose canvases are imbued with a quiet, meditative intensity.
Yet unlike Rothko's often solemn chromatic harmonies, Mifsud's surfaces are more turbulent, layered with gestural marks, clouded atmosphere, where shapes dissolved into a gentle, misty blur and calligraphic lines that traverse the painted field. These markings introduce a sense of movement and restlessness, echoing the expressive vocabulary of influential American painter and sculptor, Cy Twombly, where the line becomes a trace of thought, memory, or emotional disturbance. The result is a dynamic interplay between immersion and interruption, between depth and fragmentation.
What distinguishes Mifsud's work, however, is not merely its stylistic affinities but its psychological resonance. Her paintings may be understood as visual manifestations of the inner world, a concept central to psychoanalytic thought. When she speaks of "shutting off from the outer world" in order to paint, she signals toward a withdrawal that is not escapist but generative. In the terms of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, this can be seen as the creation of a transitional space: a zone between reality and imagination in which creativity emerges. Within this space, painting becomes a form of psychic containment, allowing emotions to be held, transformed, and rearticulated.
Colour, in this context, functions as more than an aesthetic choice; it becomes a language of affect. The deep blues that permeate some of her canvases evoke immersion and introspection, suggesting a descent into the unconscious. In contrast, the intense reds that dominate some works convey energy, urgency, even a sense of confinement or pressure. Meanwhile, the presence of pinks and warmer tones introduces a different register, one of vulnerability, tenderness, and transition. These chromatic shifts can be interpreted through the symbolic frameworks proposed by Carl Jung, for whom colours often carry archetypal associations linked to universal psychic patterns.
At the same time, the fragmented quality of Mifsud's compositions, where dense clusters of colours are disrupted by erratic lines, suggests an ongoing negotiation within the psyche. There is a tension between cohesion and disintegration, between the desire for unity and the experience of fragmentation. Such dynamics resonate with psychoanalytic understandings of the self as a structure in process, continually shaped by internal and external forces.
The repetitive gestures evident in her mark-making further reinforce this reading. The layering of strokes, the recurrence of certain movements, and the accumulation of marks across the canvas evoke what Sigmund Freud described as repetition compulsion: the unconscious tendency to revisit unresolved experiences. In Mifsud's work, however, repetition is not merely symptomatic; it is also transformative. Through the act of painting, repetition becomes a means of working-through, allowing the artist to engage with and reconfigure her inner states.
Importantly, her practice is also deeply embodied. The physicality of the paint, its thickness, its texture, its layering points to a form of thinking that is enacted through the body rather than articulated through language. The canvas becomes a site where gesture, movement, and sensation converge, producing a visual field that is as tactile as it is optical.
Viewed together, the works in this exhibition can be understood as mapping a journey across different emotional and psychic states. The cooler, blue-dominated compositions suggest immersion and depth, while the red-infused canvases introduce intensity and agitation. The interplay of warmer hues, particularly pinks and oranges, signals moments of transition, spaces where one emotional register gives way to another. This chromatic progression may be read as a movement through the inner landscape, a passage that is neither linear nor resolved but continually unfolding.
Ultimately, Mifsud's paintings do not seek to depict the soul; they enact it. They invite the viewer not to interpret in a purely intellectual sense, but to feel, to respond, and to enter a shared space of affective experience. In an age increasingly dominated by external stimuli and digital mediation, her work offers a return to the immediacy of sensation and the depth of introspection.
As such, this forthcoming exhibition promises not only a visual encounter but a psychological one, an invitation to engage with colour as emotion, gesture as thought, and painting as a profound exploration of the inner self.
'Colours of Introspection' runs at Bizzilla Art Space (Mapfre MSV Life), Floriana from 6 to 28 August
Prof. Louis Laganà PhD (Lough) is an academic, curator and practising artist