Under Construction - 2009 - Maritime Museum, Vittoriosa, Malta
"[In this new body of work] This marriage of medium and concept revealed itself in a much more extended piece of visual research ...[The work] represents an attempt to confront a problem head-on by working with the very materials that constitute the problem. If Scicluna had the financial capability to develop his ideas on a much grander scale, he would probably develop full-scale, concrete architectural works of art that functioned (structurally and semiotically) both as ‘buildings’ and as conceptual works that commented about the act of building. The work itself would become the problem because it would contribute to Maltese urban sprawl at the same time as it interpreted the problem artistically. Indeed, even though Scicluna has so far restricted himself to sculptural works on a smaller scale, the materials he works with evince a very thorough form of artistic honesty. The hard, heavy and bulky materials he uses are far from easy to handle and rapidly lead to storage problems, yet Scicluna’s artistic integrity (his desire to maintain a strong connection between all aspects of the creative process) does not tolerate convenient solutions. ...Scicluna’s investigation of urban themes has been quite methodical; his research can in fact be broadly sub-divided into conscious and rather diverse conceptual developments. ...Some of these relief-constructions made of concrete casts border on abstraction and exemplify a deliberate exploration of geometric form, almost an attempt to re-arrange the urban environment into something more aesthetically digestible. ...One minimalist work stands out from the rest. Maltese Bonsai is a floor-piece composed of a number of bricks with a small plant growing in a circular hole cut into one of these bricks. The brick is metonymic, while the plant does not represent or symbolise anything beyond its own existence. This little patch of greenery is exactly what it looks like, a stunted growth suffocated by concrete. Here, more than in any other work, Scicluna comes across as an environmentalist at heart. The built environment is offset by the living organism it walls in and which, by implication, it eventually replaces. If Scicluna’s first experiments with the medium accentuated geometrical relationships, this work is about the possibility of life itself. "
Dr Raphael Vella
