SHARDSOFZEN

COLLECTIONSIMONPAUL|8

Gerhard Richter | November
Limited edition 567/800
signed by the artist

SHARDSOFZEN

OPENDAY

ASIFBYMAGIC

I love this character for 2 many reasons ! :-)

COUNTUP

Simon did not get the good news we were hoping for - Art for once  seems to shut up. Like everything else... Only faith whispers...

1stVS3rd

Im finding writing an artist statement a dread. Not just because my work has been fluctuating in the media it manifests in but even on a concept level. This might be perhaps that on a personal level there is similar fluctuations and turmoils.

I realised that my statement was written in the first person and the obvious change the reader experiences if whatever content that may be was written about the artist by someone else. It becomes more professional and somehow more trustworthy. 

I agree that this is true. However it troubles me a bit, not  in the sense that i oppose it or want to fight the personal point of view corner, but for me it creates another detachment from what i think i know about my work and what it actually is. Perhaps this is needed and what makes ones work more mature.

I am first week in the Robert Callender Residency for Young Artists 2nd part. Working at Sea Loft. Niall Stevenson is currently in Japan doing his 1st part of the residency. The Japanese Artist working here as well is Kaori Matsumura and she is great to work with. 

Last night i tested my piece, where for this residency I am taking my work 8. a step forward and am aiming to make the work steal any source of light that illuminates it from outside to be illuminated solely from within. The element of pressure is still going to be present as it is important that the element of latching is maintained. However it is taking a step back this time as the whole work will have another tangent that is illuminated in a similar manner, however its latching on the building is aided only by gravity. 

This work will be adapted and takes its inspiration form a staircase in Summerhall. I like the fact that it will not be presented in a conventional gallery space. It reacts well with the history of the building and its return to Art. - An analogy to the fact that the founder of the college, William Dick have given his first lectures about this subject in the Art School because there was no proper place established.

______________________________________________

Today is real life again. Where does art begin and where does it interact/stop/merge/infuse/transform/stayconstant? with the real life. Getting the first CT Scan results to see if treatment for Squamous Cell Carcinoma in the gums has worked. Simon MacFadyen is a great person and very dear to me. I pray and hope the results are good.  

INWRITING

Looking at artist’s work of the last 3 – 4 years, anyone may feel bemused at the idea that some of these pieces are one person’s work. As from 2009 there is an evident and deliberate distancing from painting as the work starts posing different kinds of experiential requirements on the viewer. Installation and sculpture, especially a particular interest in curved surfaces leads the artist to consider ‘the site’. The definition of this term, or ‘ the site specific’ is not a static one – yes the work Tixref considers the physical space where it exists, unfolds and being posed upon. Although such relation is perceived in subsequent pieces, each work seems less dependable on the direct physical site it is shown in, but starts to comment on satellite sites such as the works http://, cyclical and 77. Having participated in diverse calls, projects, and collaborations the medium of the artist tends to change depending on what suits best a concept to be communicated. Despite such changes, a metaphysical enquiry on the repercussions of the human act seems to ripple in most of his work. In the latest works Stratum and Residuum, the artist explores the direct relationships between what something is and what it looks like – an element present in Robert Callender’s  works. Being Artist in Residence at Sea Loft and so close to Callender’s work Calleja chooses to tackle his series 1.2.4.8.16. This is a series of temporary interventions that involve glass and wood. Each intervention heightens a different aspect of the work through: its applied pressure, its visibility, its temporal existence, its latching relation to the site. How this series will evolve, in its perception or affectation by the viewer will unfold in future explorations.

RESIDUUM|31.4934cm2

Residuum 31.4934cm2

2013

pencil and eraser on paper

This is a stain that informed the Intervention at CASO, already described in a previous post. The intervention was concluded by erasing all the applied paint marks to hide the paint stained ground in the allocated site. It was an idea to tease out, in dirtying of the ground, (by the application of paint) in order to make it look clean (hiding the existing stains by new painted stains morphing to the approximate ground area)

I felt the need to translate this process into another one - that of drawing. I wanted to see how to comment in the language of drawing on the stain itself. This is a desaturated image of the original stain, and all removal of subtle colour just emphasises that the sole subject of interest here is this particular, accidental stain.

For the drawing:

•  I did not want to express any of my marks on this image so i traced the main subject to be as accurate as possible to the original. 
• The original being - a printed full scale 1:1 print to the actual size of the stain in CASO
• And the drawing started

I was interested in the concept of where this piece was going more than the actual drawing itself. I tried to make a realistic drawing of the stain as possible not to show off any skill of drawing but to drain the drawing of any personal impression or interpretation. For this matter anyone else who can copy in pencil could have done this bit for me. 

At a few stages earlier than the above image, the subject of this work got more clear to me and how could I re interpret the stain using the process of drawing itself (i.e. the application of marks with pencil and the erasing of the same marks with a rubber). I decided to take back the stain to its basic existence i.e. paint. Usually paint is quantified by its coverage area. On any tin it would tell you what is the surface area covered by its content volume. The most accurate way I could calculate this was using the digital image of the stain and get a count of the white pixels that form the stain and work out a sum using direct proportion.

Sum 

(area of stain) =

Area of drawing = l x b (29cm x 21.5) = 623.5cm2

the total amount of pixels in original image of this same area amounts to 8696075 pixels

Selected pixels of stain (last image above) = 439244 pixels

623.5cm2 x 439244 / 8696075 = 31.49336154529486 cm2

31.4934cm2 = actual surface area of stain.

square root of 31.49336154529486 cm2 = 5.61189464845 cm

An area of 5.6 cm by 5.6 cm is erased from the drawing.

BELEZZANELDISEGNO

When the paper is indented yet no dark mark follows.

PADRE

PASSEDBYUNSEENYOURLOSS

http://www.krismicallef.com/spaces/2013/written-in-stone/

RCIRYA

Robert Callender International Residency for Young Artists

EXHIBITINGEXHIBITIONS

Very interesting article about curation: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/being-curated/

COLLECTIONSIMONPAUL|7

Tacita Dean | Floating Dolmen

THEVISUALINTIMEOFINIQUITY

THEGOODSHIPBLANKANDBALAST(AFTERBRANCUSI),2010

EISTELOSEGAPESENAUTOUS

CV

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/28976322/Joseph%20Calleja%20Visual%20Artist%20CV.pdf

TRYINGTOPHRASEIT

‘For me your work is about skin’, artist Victoria Bernie told me earlier on this year. I was trying to describe what my work is about, at least in terms of its enquiry. It has taken me those three infinite seconds to realize what she might mean by that. After which the shift over the last six years from drawing to painting to sculpture and then installation seemed to fall into place. Space and time within a metaphysical enquiry bracketing the repercussions of the human act are still at the heart of what my work tries to observe, document and question. However the idea of ‘skin’ as that place where two separate entities meet and inter-relate, provided me with a physical space where these concepts can exist. This idea of ‘skin’ has also cohered the diverse projects that I have undertaken over the last three years. Each project has its own statement and response to either the site or the nature of the call but it seems that this fascination about the interrelationship of two separate entities is the spark and trigger how my personal angle influences subsequent work process.

COLOURSOFTHELANDSCAPE

'Colours of the Landscape' - a Public Art Project, Western Isles Schools Project lead by artist Donald Urquhart.

COLLECTIONSIMONPAUL|6

J.K. Rowling | The Casual Vacancy | First edition. Signed by the Author.

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Norio Imai | open edition print signed by the artist

NELL'OBLIOonALLHALLOWSEVE

THEDEATHOFTHEAUTHOR

'Joseph Calleja’s large ‘portrait’ made of his friends’ Facebook profile pictures was one of the most freshest and contemporary takes in the exhibition, yet the fact that it was a ‘resolved’, locked puzzle, killed the interactive power of the piece.'

http://redwhitemt.com/2012/images-of-the-self/

I have just finished college and it seems inevitable - looking back at my work trying to see what am I really looking at... what am I about... what am I trying to say /achieve.

I would like to start writing about my work - mainly as notes to myself, making my position hover between that of the author and spectator, thinking about its stronger points and its shortcomings. I appreciate shortcomings in a work. It makes it more mortal, real and alive. In actual fact I'd have it this way rather than seeing my work flying the banner of synonymity with a signature of recognition and perfection. I would also rather present my point of view that aiming at something that has never been done before. Real rather than Perfect. True rather than Genial. Finite rather than Immortally numb.

I started this post with an extract from a review of the exhibition Wicc imb Wicc. Pawlu gave me a great tap on the back for my work 'Għidli ma' min...' dropping adjectives of 'freshest' and 'most contemporary' against my work.

But I used this extract not to underline those two elements or the shortcoming pointed out by the reviewer (as to its interactivity).  I used it because, for the first time, (perhaps this being my first proper exhibition as an artist and not a student) I just realised how the work stopped belonging to me and my thoughts the moment it was viewed by anyone else. As a student I wrote an essay about the 'death of the author'. This was when I experienced a side of that.

This piece was about self-portraiture. As I tend to struggle with my works with a tendency of being loaded with meaning, I thought that this was a characteristic of my personality and it would not harm the piece if there was an element of that in it. More than aiming to do a work of art, I wanted to give across a point of view riddled with underlying meanings. A puzzle with more than one probable solution was only one side to that.

There are several elements that make this piece short of being successful, I think. But these same elements are the ones that make the piece more humane, vulnerable, fallible and synonymous to myself.

The element that did not work (as I intended), in this exhibition was - each cell depicting a profile of one of my friends. This part of the work overtook the conceptual and formal existence of the whole piece - Most viewers with the ability to recognise their common friends or publicly renowned profiles  have just seen this at the expense of everything else the piece stated.

It might have worked well or better at least if this piece was exhibited in a country where it is highly unlikely that any viewer could have recognised anybody's profile. It was for me a fascinating experience, something that I overlooked. In a way it could have not been truer to me than to have the public passing by the real meaning. But I remind myself, to make a distinction between the intention triggering the work, and the resulting work itself. I should have known this by now.

Another experience was when one person pulled me aside to show me the their knowledge of forced perspective applied by the skull painting in the Holbein's work:

 

I had to smile at this as the person apologised for their remark in the same statement for not to hurt my feelings. I smiled because when I used forced perspective I thought more of the RBS logo on Murrayfield's stadium than Holbein's work. 

It was never my intention to make a work about the innovative nature of forced perspective. And even if I was the first one to use this technique, making a such a statement in a work with another agenda would have never worked. I simply used forced perspective as a tool - a solution to link the two puzzles together through the viewer only (i.e the portraits would look from the front only from a precise point in between the two puzzles as seen from the viewer).

As I said, for me it is a learning curve, always. Just because I am not a student anymore does not mean this tension has stopped. 

It is interesting what jumps out at the viewer, and how little control I have over it. In a way I do not want to control the viewer. I have an agenda when I make a work. Most of the times I have to strip away my agenda s and influences from the work itself, in order for a piece to work. So at least I can say that I never have a list behind a work that i expect the viewer is supposed to get when seeing my work.

One thing that stayed present in my practice since I can remember trying to do something worth doing is the experimental approach. One positive thing about this way of working is that I always end up with a set of new questions, which keeps my inquiry fresh.

I NEVER depart with an aim of composing the 'best' or 'most perfect' work! The being 'original'. I despise such terminology when I want to describe my art practice as this is not what I am trying to achieve, not a priori at least.

If a work ends up with such elements, its fine, however some of the best things that happened in my work, I had to learn to read after the work was finished. It seems as if my work is always those few stages ahead of me.

ROBERTCALLENDER

http://www.robertcallender.co.uk/

LIZOGILVIE

http://www.elizabethogilvie.com/info.php

LANUBEDELLANONCONOSCENZA

I decided to title this post as the cloud of the unknowing. It is originally a title of an ascetic book (christian mysticism book as i was corrected).

I wanted to find an image to hint at Dante's circles of hell - the first trail of the 

necessary journey.

It feels a bit like that. Emotions hover from excitement to shiver of the unknown. 

The unforeseen path lies ahead...

RESIDUUM

Residuum - a small amount of something that remains after the main part has gone or been taken or used.

Before this work process started, I had little idea of what to expect or ideas to prepare - I only knew (made myself decide) that I wanted to do something site specific. Old paint marks on the ground informed the whole work process as well as how other artists who were painters were treating the area of where they were painting (with protective mats covering all areas). 

I decided to use the existing old paint marks as a source for action. I marked out the ground area where my space was with masking tape. Within this parameter I decided to use paint (gouache and water colour) to hide the existing old marks. Outside this area I decided to use the same paint to cover but this time to extend the existing marks. This non permanent paint would be removed as part of the work. It is the action that will complete the work.

A series of screen prints will be proposed, as a reflection on the completed work. The intervention finds its completion in cleaning the floor (by removing the paint which was painted in the first place to hide old stains within the marked zone). There are different treads of interest coming out of this intervention and these 3 screen prints help out to dissect such outlines of thought.

ARTSHOWER2012

An experimental intervention that I am carrying out as part of the Robert Callender International Residency for Young Artists 2012!

STRATUM

This proposed work recalls and departs from the previous work that the artist has executed in May 2011 as part of a collaboration entitled ‘Cyclical’ http://www.josephcalleja.co.uk/cyclical. It will also inform a series of works that the artist is currently proposing the the National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta which will explore the idea of skin - the idea of it being a barrier between two entities.

Using impermanent pigment, the artist has made a painting informed by the sea as documented just off the island of Comino. Then this painting will be submerged into Kamo river accross from Weissraum where the left marks will document the distinction between something that looks like water and water itself. 

The way this concept is executed is quite poetic and the process itself echoes Japanese attention to the ephemeral happenings of life, elevating them to ethereal levels.

painting hanging in gallery

painting taken down and submerged in Kamo river for 1 min

painting hanging in gallery again with remaining paint fragments falling apart by the effect of river water