Louis Laganà on Expressions Exhibition – Rachel Galea

Prof. Louis Laganà PhD (Lough) is an associate professor of art and lectures on art and wellbeing.

The famous French novelist and writer of the literary school of naturalism, Émile Zola, defines art as ‘nature seen through a temperament’. He emphasized the uniqueness of the individual’s own sensibility and the possibility that the extreme traits of personality can find expression in a novel or a painting.

Rachel Galea’s style and technique of her painting matured amazingly during the last years. Galea devoted her time at her studio, painting landscapes of her native Island, Gozo, and studies of our environment and nature. When looking at her paintings, one can identify the deeply felt sensations of nature and how her personality emerges through the rich paint textures and strongly conceived compositions. The artist’s works are easily recognisable because she paints on canvas with thick impasto textures. This signature style in her paintings is also achieved by using vivid colour like bold blues and deep greens and rich yellows and warm orange colours. In this collection of paintings, Galea also demonstrates the beauty of the changing light according to the time of the day and this is reflected on the pigments she uses. So, we are seeing that ‘colour’ is a major force in Galea’s oil paintings.

Galea humanises her landscapes and transmits a transcendental experience to the viewers, thus projecting a sense of beauty that makes us feel at peace and in unity with the universe. As Paul Cézanne once stated, ‘the landscape reflects on itself, humanizes itself, thinks inside me. I objectify and fix on my canvas…but it seems to me as if I am the subjective consciousness of this landscape, and my canvas its objective consciousness.’ Rachel Galea absorbs what is around her and creates an idiom to achieve powerful structures, well-knit compositions and above all to express sensations.

In Rachel Galea’s landscape studies, I also see a sort of parallelism with the work of renowned, late, artist, Joseph Bellia (1932-1999) who was a leading landscape painter in Malta. Like Bellia, Galea depicts her subjects with a vibrant palette and uses her colour expressively, making it the main component. The artist is undoubtedly inspired by the intensity of the Maltese sunlight which is revealed in many of her works. For example, in her paintings Għasri, Comino from Nadur and Lunzjata I, she applies directional and constructive brushstrokes with sometimes parallel strokes of colours. The bright light in these scenes and others creates several brilliant highlights and saturates the natural colour of earth and foliage. The skies are created with her own atmosphere using gestural brushwork and colourful imagination so as to contrast with the rest of the composition.

The sea is another source of inspiration for Galea. Works like Salt Pans at Sunrise, Sunrise at Marsalforn and Xwejni Bay clearly illustrate her love for the lightRachel Galea 11of the early morning sun and a way the artist seeks for peace and tranquillity of her ambiance. It is a mediation between inner reality and the outside world.

In recent years, Rachel Galea also produced a series of studies of flowers and close-ups of lush vegetation. Her colourful brushstrokes are meticulously placed on canvas and sometimes her compositions border on abstraction. Stylistically, at times, these works range from an impressionist rendering of the scene to a near expressionist vision of rurality. In these compositions, what is most important for the artist is to create rich and expressive colours and to show their beauty in different types of light. But I also consider that suchartistic practice and creative endeavours is a selfobject experience in which self (the artist) and object (the landscape) are ‘fused and subjectively flooded with sensation of perfection and vitality’ (Hagman, 2010). Rachel Galea loves light/colour which are the medium of emotion and feeling. Her landscapes have ‘presence’ and a direct visual appeal and a sense of daring originality from the artist.

From Rachel Galea’s collection of paintings, it is clear that she has an irrational urge to link us to nature and share significant moments from her life with us through vivid colour and paint.

Expressions of nature in Gozo art exhibition

The Sunday Times of Malta January 1, 2023