The art of finding ‘Connections’

Man is drawn towards the geometrical as it provides the luxury of structure and containment.  In German artist and theoretician Josef Albers words: “To design is to plan and to organise, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore, it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.” This is especially relevant to the oeuvre of veteran Maltese artist Alfred Camilleri, who has incessantly explored this axiom throughout his career and whose solo exhibition, Connections, is currently on at MUŻA.

One is immediately drawn by Camilleri’s search for structured composition – found objects offer already defined parameters in three dimensions. The spatial qualities of a box can be analysed and categorised via some predetermined and universally accepted designation. One defines a box as a factor of its length, width and height, besides by its inherent function as a container. What lies or is stored in it are the variables that determine its weight.

Alfred Camilleri

Going along some way with the Schrödinger’s cat paradox, the box might contain just air or might be the hiding place for a lazy cat, or it might...