Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1514108
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 7 JANUARY 2024 6 INTERVIEW Diary of L-Aqwa generation IT'S hard not to be struck by the garish, punk, 'D.I.Y.' assault on the senses that marked Ryan Falzon's work of pop art: referential works that illustrate com- mon denominators from the world of Maltese thuggery and criminality, fa- miliar tropes from the worlds of the unsophisticated and undesirables, from clapped-up Escorts to renders of St Paul of Tarsus, from Travis Bickle to the Baader-Meinhof gang, or St Francis of Assisi with effigies of stuffed birds of prey. Much of this early work has been punctuated by his bold strokes of un- compromising colour, primitivist rendi- tions of men, women and animals, and never without a commentary or theme that concerns the zeitgeist that Falzon's artistic and literary career is so clearly preoccupied with. During the pandemic, Falzon's love for plants and gardening produced his first series of lockdown art, that soon devel- oped into a series of works over the two years that followed. They appear to rep- resent a radical departure from the freely transgressive work of the younger artist, but again, it is hard not to feel the unbri- dled enjoyment with one's surroundings in this work: the joyful representation of gardening and flora in settings so familiar to the Maltese, gives us an art that is red- olent of the island and its tropes, maybe a gas cylinder in a back-yard surrounded by pots and plants, ferns climbing out of used paint buckets, ornate house furniture or gaudy paraphernalia. Falzon always acknowledges the world he is in through its crude references. His first novel Sajf is as much a chronicle of fellow millennials as it is a reflection of unassuming ordinariness – filtered over the course of a three-month Maltese sum- mer – that depicts a very recent passage of time, comfortably termed through La- bour's celebrated slogan of its Muscatian era, 'l-aqwa żmien'. And while not as vis- ceral as the repudiation sung in Brikkuni's 'Alla Lliberani', Falzon's Sajf is also one of the voices of this same generation which both dipped their feet as well as got their hands burnt by the excess of Malta's ste- roidal growth. With their riotous representations and garish colours, Ryan Falzon's bold artistic oeuvre has been crowned by the surprise hit of his millennial-manifesto Sajf – a chronicle of Malta's summer ennui, sex, sea, hooking-up... and some tinkering on an old BMW. So, what will he do next, MATTHEW VELLA asks. Are we ready for the hard knocks of the critic, and is the critic's skin tough enough for the job? Critics must be critics: they cannot be curators, writers or editors.