Of anecdotes, old and new

“Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning” – Samuel Butler

A sense of expectation, or maybe foreboding, is a constant in Gozitan artist David Debono’s oeuvre. He depicts fleeting moments as anecdotes originating from a murky subconscious. He interprets these fragments of memory when he elegiacally transposes them as possible narratives. His quest is similar to that of American artist Andrew Wyeth, an artist whom he admires. Wyeth was after “a fleeting moment, but not a frozen moment”. The term ‘Anecdotes’ demands a flow of recollection rather than a momentary flash of realisation. At times, this Proustian reaching out to one’s past life elicits nostalgia. At other times, the shroud of denial is lifted and the sharp pangs of remorse have nowhere to hide. 

Debono suggests and hints at a storyline but leaves it entirely up to the viewer to decipher the content and the context. There is the same sense of disorientation that one experiences when one comes across a tattered and decrepit album of old family photos. One attempts to give a context to these strangers, these ghosts that demand respect and that disdainfully look back as if no time at all had...