A Maltese artist transforming typical limestone into Malta

Antoine Farrugia is a Maltese artist whose works with pure and at the same time sensual forms arise from his love for the stone artefact to release an emotional energy that manages to express his deepest feelings about him. His talent consists in transforming globigerina, a soft limestone typical of Malta, into art works that restores the subtlety of paper.

Sensual, pure and subtle shapes

Organized by the Cultural Agency of the Maltese Ministry of Culture, It's all Paperwork is the sixth solo exhibition by Farrugia, who has also participated in numerous group exhibitions. Her works can also be admired in various public spaces both in Malta and abroad.

The sculptor as a model of his passion

“The artist does not borrow a 'material', but researches a synthesis of many limestone material components, and makes them his own, or rather, sculpts them in a form that is only apparently abstract, without this containing an image of the outside world: he makes it become an expression of his form" he writes the art critic Gérard-Georges Lemaire in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue.  

“The expression of these volumes are data, harmonies and plastic information that the viewer must grasp as reactions of the Maltese limestone material, always combined with the expression”.

The sensations generated by the undulations of the sculpted material

“There could be many readings, interpretations that we find in the undulations of the sculpted material, but no need 'research', it is necessary to make our sensations react in relation to the volumetric suggestions of the sculpture itself. All these forms have no scholastic paternity, they impose themselves, because they are the expression of the free thought aspect of our Century, even of that strange "short" previous century, dedicated to abstraction, from Kandinsky onwards”.

Matter suggests, envelops and seduces

“His choice comes from the ground, it rises little by little, from a profound conviction, in this sense the matter is not alone, but is lived and accompanied by the shape that suggests, envelops and seduces. A profound alchemy that of Globigerina. Indeed, Antoine Farrugia does not abandon figuration, but reads it in a different form, modulates it and brings it back to life as a dynamic model of his way of expressing reality”.