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3 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 14 SEPTEMBER 2025 ART WENS: Comfortable Silence is a solo exhibition by Rebecca Bo- naci where the artist explores the immense potential of the daily mundane, finding solace in the quiet rhythms of lives lived to- gether in love and intimacy be- hind closed doors. Drawing from her own experience, Bonaci turns to painting, drawing and sculp- ture to reveal how the most pro- found meaning often resides in the smallest of moments—where silence is not emptiness, but a space of connection, memory, and belonging. In Joseph Aquilina's Mal- tese-English Dictionary, the translation of 'wens' is given as "the feeling of peace of mind one experiences in somebody's com- pany."1 In this exhibition, Bona- ci looks inward, celebrating and recording the small clan of loved ones who nourish her. Rendered in loose, living colours, her paint- erly language adds a bodily thrum to images that depict a dreamlike world where men, women, and children live together in harmo- ny amongst stars, flowers, and clouds. At a time when productivity is prioritised over nearly everything else, Bonaci's choice to depict moments of intimacy with no purpose beyond themselves be- comes quietly radical, 1 Joseph Aquilina, Maltese-English Dic- tionary (1999), s.v. "wens." "offering a moment of stillness in a fast-moving world," as she phrases it. Her work claims that fulfillment arises not through the ego-driven construction of self, but through giving, through rela- tionality, and through an aware- ness of the other. In many regards, Wens is a sister exhibition to Bonaci's 2023 solo Ġuf, not only stylistically but al- so in its exploration of embodied personhood, especially as it re- lates to female experience. Herit- age and connection to what came before—familial and societal— run through both exhibitions, and the preservation of memory has become a common thread in Bonaci's work. Belonging, her images suggest, becomes possi- ble only when we acknowledge the landscape of shared remem- brance that holds us all. Bonaci's images have a dreamlike longing to them. They are drawn from re- al inner experience but express an imaginary state of wholeness and hold onto a utopian desire for a world where a complete harmo- ny between self and other, with family and nature, is possible. Her figures are mostly nude, without discomfort, lacking shame, be- cause the landscape, the sea and the clouds amongst which they float are free from judging eyes. In Wens, Bonaci immerses us in her tactile, silent, and soft world. There is a dual energy to her work: the awareness that the world is changing, and loss is inevitable, but also a promise that by looking inward, slowing down, and focus- sing on moments with people we love, existential anxiety can be replaced by a deeper sense of self, rooted in the other. "I hope that one day, when I look back at my drawings, they'll wrap my heart in the same comfort I felt while cre- ating them," she writes. Implicit in her work is a hope, therefore, that the same solace might also reach us as we enter her tender, utopian world. An opening re- ception will be held on 19 Sep- tember, from 7:30pm onwards at Valletta Contemporary Gallery, East Street, Valletta. Open to the general public, refreshments will be provided. WENS: Comfortable Silence, by Rebecca Bonaci