Valletta



Artist Charlot Cassar is currently showing his most recent collection of ceramic works of art at St James Cavalier, Centre for Creativity, Valletta. Earth explores the fabric of an elemental landscape that, stripped of all things trivial, becomes a transcendental and almost spiritual experience. These ethereal landscapes have no direct contextual reference to the real world but they envelope the viewer in a profound visual and tactile discourse that evokes a primordial and instinctive state of consciousness. Land, sea and sky drift in a very intimate space, coalescing into a specific moment in time that is surreptitiously captured in clay by the artist.

Cassar’s preoccupation with landscape, its contours and forms, its texture and colour, is a recurring theme in the artist’s body of work. Each tableau, an assemblage of clay slabs that lie next to each other, reveals the artist’s fascination with geological formations. Each refers to something very familiar, yet actually very different. The works suggest an earth in a seeming state of order, a structured chaos. Perhaps, it is a purely aesthetic re-interpretation of a lost paradise where the paradoxical dualities of life come together. Or perhaps, the work is the direct anti-thesis of a fragmented civilisation and an exquisite form of sheer escapism.

An artist and educator, Charlot Cassar has been exhibiting his work in Malta and abroad for the past years. The exhibition runs till December 5, 2010 and is being supported by the Malta Arts Fund, Middlesea Valletta Life, Bank of Valletta and My Wyn (Attard & Co. Ltd.). His work can be seen at www.charlotcassar.com.