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Kenneth Zammit Tabona at
B’Art
The Times Weekender -
16th February - By Astrid Vella
Although Kenneth Zammit
Tabona’s most recent exhibition spans the output of a
relatively short space of time and is quite limited due
to the size of the winebar venue, it covers an almost
disarming variety of styles.
These changing styles are
not, I feel, due to any indecision on Zammit Tabona’s part,
but due to a light-hearted approach to art. Zammit Tabona is
no dilettante, he has worked hard at his craft, but is not
heavy on the philosophical aspirations of his art, and
contrary to what many may imagine, Zammit Tabona is
surprisingly humble and unpretentious about his works.
However, ever since he took the major step of shaking off
the shackles of his ‘Baroque’ style of painting, where he
literally painted himself into a corner, the victim of his
own success, he seems to be revelling in his new-found
freedom where experimentation is the order of the day.
Although this can produce a
few near misses, it also produces paintings that speak to us
of happiness and spontaneity, movement and light. The range
begins with Zammit Tabona adapting his ‘Baroque’ painting
skills to garden ‘interiors’ rather than domestic ones,
painting these lush garden displays with as much, if not
more aplomb than his earlier interiors, and lavishing all
his skill in producing a scene just as rich as his wealthy
interiors, as plants climb and intertwine in painterly
embroidery.
Painted with very few shadows
or lightening of palette, these busy scenes share that
rather one-dimensional, childlike quality of the earlier
interiors. In ‘Argotti Herbarium’ a riot of colourful
plants compete with each other for attention, while the
artist seems to revel in highlighting the different forms
and colours of plants, in an almost naïf set-piece. I have
to admit to finding some of these paintings too dense and
overpowering, however in other paintings one cannot help but
admire Zammit Tabona’s verdant filigree.
In departing from this style,
“Buskett after the rain” is a lovely milestone, where Zammit
Tabona’s evident love of all things green is still in
evidence, but dense shrubbery is replaced by fresh colour
washes, a strong composition and a much more subtle and
mellow palette. Here both line and colour lead us to the
focal point of the painting, a much more satisfactory
rendering of the plant landscape theme.
In other paintings it is
skies and seas that dominate, where Zammit Tabona’s style
tends to be far looser, allowing his medium to take the lead
with some very happy results like that of
“The Tower at Xlendi” where a
beautiful winter’s sky of scudding clouds is reflected in a
translucent indigo sea.
Another impressionistic tour
de force is “Mdina Landscape” where loose brushstrokes, so
much more difficult in watercolours or Zammit Tabona’s
trademark inks, than oils, create a dynamic, charged
atmosphere.
Then again “Road to No-Where”
is completely different, a small, very stylish, static work
where form and colour take over to produce an almost
geometric rendering of a road lined on one side by Aleppo
trees, whose characteristic shape Zammit Tabona has
captured, this time with minimalist beauty.
The common thread that binds
these paintings that range from ‘painterly embroidery’ to
‘minimalist beauty’ is of course Zammit Tabona’s plein air
painting theme; irrespective of the attributes of the
individual painting, it is so evident throughout the
exhibition, that Zammit Tabona derives great joy out of this
activity, a joy he succeeds in transmitting to the viewer in
many different styles and guises, but always there, a
celebration of our landscape, our world.
The exhibition runs at D’Art, Amery Street,
Sliema from 1st Feb till 29th
Feb. Opening hours 4 – 7pm Mon to Thur, Fri from 4 – 11pm
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