Post Exhibition Blues

Overview

Former Chocolate Factory resident Mark Gerada's new exhibition at Gaffa has two themes. One is the almost post-natal sadness that descends on you after you stage an exhibition. The other is an unreal tint of blue he saw while swimming in a sea-cave in the island of Gozo, off his ancestral Malta. Malta itself has layers of history, settled one over the other like sheathes of glass. In Post Exhibition Blues, Mark Geraba uses his own overlapping shades to describe the ethereal glow of both these blues.

Seeing bones in them at first is not uncommon. But they are not meant to be bones. There is light. Light of all kinds, pushing and pulsing and overlapping with defined edges and hard glass-like form. A gallery of candle shapes. Eyes. Stars. Blue waveforms. What seems to be a lithe blue figure is a current of water. A sub-antarctic iceberg stands for nothingness. And what at first were hooded monks are metaphors for movement and more intimate things. Almost at the end, you meet the cave with some little specks of light leading to its rocky mouth. The three big canvasses on the far wall are the disappointing moment. All through the exhibition, these wonderful paintings have begged to be huge. But the three large canvases are an anti-climax — not triumphant moments, just ice-blue lights and twin foci.

In the Exhibition's notes, Gerada claims the abstract influence of Malevich. But the paintings bring the work of Malevich’s rival Kandisky equally to mind. Although it could have done with more of Kandinsky’s oversize scale, Gerada seems to have some of the same sense of warmth — despite the coolness of the mood, and his work’s calm watery stillness.

Image by Mark Gerada.