The following is a critique by Professor Kenneth Wain that evaluates my abstract works; it forms part of a critical essay on Abstract Art in Malta from the 1960s to the 2000s.

Christopher Saliba, who is a few years younger than Camilleri {Austin} hails, like him, from Gozo and also does installations like him, chiefly interventions into the Gozitan environment. He also does photography. Like Camilleri, whom he followed to Perugia in the years 1997-2001 (after an earlier education as an art teacher at the University of Malta), he began to do abstracts very early in his artistic career. In an early, 1995, exhibition he described his works as being about getting to the roots of human spirituality (the “complex nature of the human being”) as well as exploring the “primordial link between man and the natural environment.” He seeks to establish this link symbolically by integrating natural materials like sand into his works, and by recreating textures that reproduce the marks of erosion, and of human agency, on the rocky Mediterranean Gozitan landscape and on its walls and buildings. Saliba’s earlier work is structured and contemplative in its approach, described by the artist himself as a meticulous search for balance between form, colour, and texture. With a very pronounced reliance on collage, it integrates various materials with different textures, fabric and otherwise, that are painted into and onto the canvas. Saliba’s earlier works were signed with his characteristic use of blues and reds and his reliance on a heavy impasto Expressionist technique. His most recent work, however, has left off much of this reliance on dense texture and thick impasto and turned to a dripping technique, the use of lighter colours, a more veiled collage, and, most significantly, the introduction of light. He uses the palette more freely and widely and is less tied to the object. Consequently the work is lighter, more vigorous and spontaneous, and more vivid. At the same time, he has kept faith, even in these more recent works, with the ‘Cubist’ origins of Maltese abstract art, and with his interest in texture, which is still fundamental to his painting. He also, like Carbonaro and Barthet of the ‘rooftops’, has a penchant for the semi-abstract landscape which he still paints occasionally. His more recent abstract style permits him the flexible use of sweeping arcs and swirling bands of colours that taper off into lighter gradations and sometimes into pure light. Its new found spontaneity permits him to work simultaneously on different canvases at a time. Saliba has also described his art as a matter of getting in touch with his inner self, in which case these works could be described more as emotional outpourings than meditations – a description that would better fit his earlier style.

Kenneth Wain, “On Art, Spirituality, and the Search for the Inner Self: Reflections on Abstract Art in Malta from the 1960s to the 2000s”, in “Cross-Currents: Critical Essays on Art and Culture in Malta”, Allied Publications, 2008.