Vince Briffa Marginalia.
Professor Vince Briffa was born in Malta but pursued his academic career in the
United Kingdom. In 2000, he completed his Master's in Fine Arts with honours at
Leeds University. In 2009, he obtained his doctorate from the University of
Preston in the United Kingdom.
Briffa heads the Department of Digital Arts at the University of Malta and is
also an associate professor there.
Briffa's works have been showcased twice at the Venice Biennale.
The artist received significant awards, including the "Omaggio all'Arte ed
all'Innovazione a Venezia 2019" distinction awarded by the Union of Honorary
Consuls of Italy (UCOI) and the National Association of Young Innovators (ANGI)
during the Venice Biennale and the Arts Council Malta award.
CONCEPT NOTE V1 BY VINCE BRIFFA:
“I often think of my work as an ongoing book, where each work, like a mark, a
note or a thought made in its margins, adds a new layer of reflection and
meaning to the organic and entwining flow of the narrative of the main text.
Although hardly considered marginal, this distinctive activity in the margins is
mainly defined by its relation to the main text since the margins are perceived
as the excess at the periphery and surrounding it. Margins also define the
physical limits of the book, and yet, too frequently, the habitability of the
margins through writing and other marks is perceived as simple observations or
notes, being less valuable and with little to no influence on the main book.
Therefore, the works in the exhibition are marginalia extracted from a current
chapter, in themselves in a state of becoming, that dialogically contribute and
become one with my current narrative concerning the interdependence of form,
paint, colour, materials and gesture, and anything else in between.”
Vince Briffa
REDEFINING PRACTICE BY VINCE BRIFFA
"Following years of eventful practice and exhibitions that have taken my
painting and multi-mediatic art installations to numerous international
galleries and museums, including, amongst others, twice representing Malta at
the Venice Biennale (1999 & 2019), the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020
brought with it a well-needed hiatus in the flow and direction of production,
giving me time to reflect on my original vocation as a painter. More precisely,
the last four years have been spent reflecting on the activities of drawing and
painting – the processes I intentionally fuse into a single act – and redefining
this act’s significance and position within my practice. PHILOSOPHICAL
UNDERPINNING My original training in drawing and painting in the 1970s and 1980s
has fostered in me a lifelong commitment to the refinement of a particular act
of seeing, shaping a personalised method of encountering and experiencing the
world, one that primarily rests on colour (and its translation in paint) as the
main instigator of an emotional state. Based on an early interest in how the
Impressionists interpreted light and form and honed by my academic involvement
in the fusion of the art and science of vision mediated through the artist’s
body, my most recent output explores the act of painting as a perpetual state of
becoming articulated through a tight kneading the function of seeing, the
materiality of paint, and the performance of hand and body gesture. As a result
of this, through studio practice, I try to understand how the matter that I use
(paint and related materials), through my intervention on the work’s surface,
becomes the central premise of the work, in a sense, placing the work done on
the work as the work of art itself (Bird, 2011), thus challenging the more
conventional notions and historical application of matter in the practice of
painting. Like active magma, the work produced by this agency is constantly
transitional and intermedial, perpetually redefining itself through its becoming
and not signifying anything external to itself. My work, therefore, acts at the
junction of matter and form, with matter passing through contexts rather than
being disclosed by them (Massumi, 2002), acknowledging the activity of working,
erasing and further reworking of materials to be understood not as an imposition
of theme, form or meaning, but as movement through matter (Bird, 2011). Such an
organic process feeds equally from my subconscious visual and cultural
affinities as it does from a highly personal sensibility towards abstraction.
This undulating and largely lemniscatic method (as it always starts from and
ends with the medium as its focus, revisiting it repeatedly on a variety of
levels throughout the work’s timeline), while giving value to the specificities
of the materials being used, is open to and also interrupted by the same
materials’ intrusive chance occurrences. Moreover, I choose to obfuscate the
raison d'être of the work further through a playful metalinguistic exercise of
titling, which I impose on the work posthumously. The given title, at times,
teases the viewer to acknowledge a specific element that has contributed to the
process, such as a forced visual reference, an allusion to history or a comment
on a scientific phenomenon. Such a burden is intended to tease the viewer into
colouring her interpretation of the work, making it harder to experience the
work for what it really is and, therefore, skewing any further attempts at
interpretation."
References: Bird, T., (2011), Figuring Materiality, Angelaki, 16:1, p. 5-15.
Massumi, B., (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 228.
Vince Briffa works in painting, sculpture, video, and installation. He is a
Professor of Art at the University of Malta, a Fellow of Civitella Ranieri
Foundation, New York, and an International Associate at CUT Contemporary Fine
Arts Lab, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus; Fine Arts Department, Bilkent
University, Ankara, Turkey and the Scuola di Cinema, Accademia di Belle Arti,
Catania, Sicily. He was awarded the prize ‘Omaggio all’Arte ed all’Innovazione a
Venezia 2019’ at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Briffa’s work has been exhibited
in numerous prestigious venues, including the Malta Pavilion, Venice Art
Biennale, 1999 and 2019; Pierides Museum, Cyprus; Palais des Nations,
Switzerland; Museum of Modern Art, Liechtenstein; Casoria Museum, Naples; Villa
Manin Contemporary Art, Italy; MAC, Argentina; Palais Liechtenstein, Austria;
Museum of Fine Arts, Romania and Museum of Modern Art, Israel. He was
commissioned to design the monument to commemorate the Valletta Summit on
Migration in Valletta in 2015. His work forms part of many local and
international private and public collections. Briffa has also curated
exhibitions internationally, including the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Münchner
Künstlerhaus, Munich; Les Rencontres Arles; De Harmonie, Leeuwarden; and the
Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta amongst many others.
