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“It is surely Freidrich and Turner who first pursued most passionately and successfully the creation of a pictorial world without matter, conveyed through a vision of landscape, seascape, skyscape… [that] immerse us…in some primordial element of water, cloud, colour, light or fusion of all these ungraspable mysteries of nature. This unpolluted realm…becomes a release from the facts of the often sordid urban realities in which these works were actually painted…”

Robert Rosenblum, Notes on Rothko and Tradition

These selected images form part of an ongoing body of abstract photography work started in 2002 in Malta and shot at various locations worldwide. They do not follow any current trend. They are simply about the beauty of colour and form, about visual experience. To me, these images suggest something timeless, transcendental and primaeval, an escape from banal everyday existence: and yet they are a part of it, there to observe, if we pause for a moment. My aim is to open the imagination to pareidolia, to something that lies beyond representation allowing the mind to create its own interpretation.

Inspiration: My primary inspiration is colour, which in and of itself is a physical reality. I look at details of natural decay and from these create an image. The colours I experience inspire me: their contrast and the way the mind interacts to create suggestive impressions. When abstracted out of context, I perceive it as Art: the texture, the materiality, the vibrancy… I try to capture the atmospheric quality. As I shoot and compose, for that infinite split second, I feel like I have moved beyond the actuality of what is, and escaped into an ideal imaginary realm of sublime abstract impressionistic colour. All these instances and fragments of colour ignite my imagination and I see horizons, seascapes, setting suns, mountains, eternities, essences and imaginary landscapes. For me the result of these abstracted colour forms are loaded with art historical references: the work of Friedrich Turner, Van Gogh, Monet, Rothko, and the Japanese Artist Hokusai as well as Romanticism, Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism.

Subject matter: The images unfold in front of me in a moment of visual contact. Yet so much depends upon the way time and the elements have transformed the paint to create something unconscious, unaware of its own beauty. Most of the subjects I shoot are microcosmic details in a process of transformation and as such are very time specific: a detail on a weathered wall, a boat brought out of the water for repainting, or something abandoned, disused, aged with time.

Technique: The objective of photography in the artistic sense is not to reproduce the visible but to make visible the invisible. I am not a photographer, just an Artist using a camera (mostly my beloved Leica R4s, I have only recently started shooting digital) to photograph a painted surface that serves the purpose of not being Art. Through the lens, I move beyond the obvious to witness and reveal what goes unnoticed. I see it, feel it and shoot it, mostly in macro on film (Velvia). I zoom in on a detail, explode it and transform it into a landscape or a colour field. I just capture what I observe, with minimal use of technical imaging manipulations, or digital alteration. I approach with an open mind, looking for resonance in the essence of what exists.

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