For almost twenty-five years, Christopher Saliba has been painting the landscape around him; familiar places to which he repeatedly returns - valleys, fields, coastlines, villages and historic landmarks across Malta and Gozo. Saliba deliberately chooses idyllic, iconic and familiar places, but presents them in a state of remarkable stillness. Human activity is largely absent. There are no crowds, traffic or distractions from contemporary life. Instead, the landscape appears suspended in time, almost as if the artist is attempting to preserve it through painting before further intervention alters its character. Saliba’s Mediterranean light is not merely descriptive or picturesque. It can be intense, almost blinding, dividing the landscape into powerful areas of illumination and shadow. Yet despite its physical force, it produces silence. Hence the title: The Silence of Light. The paintings seem to inhabit a moment in which the ordinary noise of the world has temporarily disappeared. Colour remains emotionally charged, but light becomes the principal agent through which memory, place and atmosphere are brought together.
His landscapes become acts of preservation, freezing familiar places in a state of contemplation. He paints them as timeless precisely because he has spent twenty-five years watching time change them. And perhaps this is where The Silence of Light acquires its greatest urgency: the quieter and more timeless the landscape appears, the more we understand that its silence cannot be taken for granted.
His landscapes become acts of preservation, freezing familiar places in a state of contemplation. He paints them as timeless precisely because he has spent twenty-five years watching time change them. And perhaps this is where The Silence of Light acquires its greatest urgency: the quieter and more timeless the landscape appears, the more we understand that its silence cannot be taken for granted.
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