Larger than Life (exhibition)
Larger Than Life I
9 slide projectors, 7m.high motorized pendulum, TV monitor, VHS video, 24 battery torches, candles, light. Re-Interpreting Preti. Curated by Dominic Cutajar, Adrian Bartolo and Theresa M. Vella. Organised by the National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta.
Against the austere, arched walls of St. James Cavalier, a sixteenth century military stronghold, the artist projected images from Mattia Preti, an exuberant Baroque painter who spent the last forty years of his life in Malta. Attard’s Baroque celebration reflects Malta’s aesthetic preference for an elaborate style that connects space and time. Cutting across time frames, the Baroque has left an indelible mark on Malta’s society and its imagination. The time-passage motif is accentuated by Attard’s creation of ‘routes’, transforming the severe vaults of the fortress building into ornate expressions responding to Baroque theatricality. At the end of the pathway, the artist installs a pendulum, a metaphor of abstract time that also “contradicts” spatial distance: the Baroque perception in Malta has no time-frames and it survives in the 21st century in religious ceremonial, village feasts, heavily decorated dwellings and band music. Moreover, on the pendulum-pan, Attard screens sequences from a Maltese wedding, an elaborate, flamboyant expression of popular culture that provides a contemporary link to the high Baroque fashion that dominated Malta and its islanders since the seventeenth century.
Mario Azzopardi - Journalist and Theatre director based in Malta. [1]
Exhibition
- 1999: St.James Cavalier, Valletta, Malta.
Exhibition Photos
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Larger Than Life II
4m high motorized pendulum, monitor, video projector, 2 VHS players. Curated by Adrian Bartolo - Late assistant curator, National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta.
Norbert Attard’s installation is engagingly concerned with what the academia refers to as the concept of ‘simultaneous times’. On a swinging pendulum sits a monitor which televises a past installation put up by the artist. In itself, the subject-matter of the installation piece being documented was inspired by the works of Mattia Preti (1613-99) a seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter sojourning in Malta for the last forty years of his life, whose tercentenary anniversary of his death is being celebrated this year. That installation drew upon the concept of reinterpreting the past, on giving a new sense and dimension to the baroque artist by transporting him, as if by a magical performance, to our age. The plurality of times represented in the present installation succeeds in making the spectator feel a kind of lack of reality. By its very nature, the pendulum is a symbol of the empirical objectivity of time, but its display in darkness reduces this time to a mere illusion.
Adrian Bartolo - Late assistant curator, National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta.[2]
Exhibition
- 1999: 48th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy.
Exhibition Photos
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External Links
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