Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1542674
3 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 18 JANUARY 2026 ART Galina Troizky's Mystique Blues: Painting the palimpsest of a disappearing island Written by Professor Louis La- ganà, an academic, curator and practising artist GALINA Troizky's Mystique Blues is not an exhibition about a single building, nor even about architectural loss in the narrow sense. It is, more fundamental- ly, an inquiry into how cities re- member, and how they forget. Using collage and acrylic on can- vas, Troizky constructs complex visual fields in which fragments of architecture, popular culture, his- tory, and painterly gesture collide. The result is not documentation, but visual archaeology: a layered excavation of the urban psyche. While the abandoned cultural hub at Madliena known as Mys- tique provides an initial concep- tual trigger, Troizky resists any lit- eral translation of site into image. Instead, she approaches archi- tecture as a mutable mental con- struct. Buildings in her works are not stable forms but provisional assemblages, constantly dissolv- ing and re-forming. This refusal of fixed representation is crucial. It allows the exhibition to move beyond nostalgia and into a more unsettling territory, where memo- ry is unstable and heritage is per- petually under negotiation. Central to Troizky's practice is the logic of the palimpsest. Her surfaces are densely layered, com- bining photographic fragments, painted interventions, and drawn structures that partially obscure one another. This method echoes the way cities themselves are built: not as coherent wholes, but as accumulations of decisions, am- bitions, erasures, and accidents. In works such as Farewell Club Mystique, urban space appears fractured, compressed and de- molished as if multiple temporal- ities are forced to coexist within the same pictorial plane. Staircas- es lead nowhere, facades overlap, and scale collapses. The place is no longer navigable; it must be de- ciphered. Stylistically, Troizky's work occupies a compelling space be- tween control and improvisation. Architectural elements provide a skeletal framework, yet these structures are repeatedly disrupt- ed by painterly gestures, washed blues, bruised greys, and sudden chromatic ruptures. Blue operates as both atmosphere and concept. It evokes the maritime condition of the islands, but also functions psychologically, suggesting dis- tance, melancholy, and self-analy- sis. This chromatic dominance is never uniform; blues fracture into tonal variations, resisting emo- tional simplification. In her work, Sketch for Wave, this painterly sensibility becomes especially pronounced. The com- position suggests a city over- whelmed by movement, by time, by development, by its own ex- cesses. Here, architecture appears almost fluid, bending and folding under invisible pressures. The work evokes not destruction as spectacle, but erosion as process. It is less about catastrophe than about slow, cumulative strain. This is an important distinction, positioning Troizky's paintings away from apocalyptic imagery and closer to sustained critical re- flection. Collage plays a vital role in this creative process. By incorporating photographic fragments, often sourced from disparate contexts, Troizky destabilises the authority of any single viewpoint. Images drawn from popular culture, ur- ban documentation, and historical reference exist without hierarchy. This strategy mirrors contempo- rary visual experience, saturat- ed as it is by overlapping media streams. At the same time, the act of painting over and through these images reasserts the artist's hand, preventing the works from collapsing into mere accumula- tion. Although the exhibition is deep- ly resonant within the Maltese context, its concerns are far from insular. Troizky's engagement with endangered heritage aligns with broader international de- bates about the relationship be- tween development, memory, and identity. Andreas Huyssen has argued that contemporary cul- ture is marked by an "obsession with memory" precisely because of accelerated urban transforma- tion and cultural amnesia. Troiz- ky's work can be read as a paint- erly response to this condition, visualising the tension between remembrance and erasure rather than resolving it. Equally relevant is Gaston Bachelard's notion of space as psychologically charged rather than purely functional. In Mystique Blues, architecture is never neutral. Buildings become repositories of emotion, desire, and failure. The city is not simply inhabited; it inhabits us in return. Troizky's fragmented spaces re- flect this reciprocity, suggesting that when cultural spaces are abandoned or erased, something intangible is lost alongside them. Importantly, this solo art exhibi- tion, Mystique Blues does not of- fer solutions. It does not moralise or prescribe. Instead, it slows the viewer down. The density of the works demands sustained look- ing; meaning emerges gradually, through navigation rather than immediate recognition. This in- sistence on attention is itself a quiet act of resistance in a cultural climate that privileges speed, effi- ciency, and surface-level engage- ment. Seen in continuity with Troiz- ky's earlier explorations of threat- ened heritage: most notably Time Space and… Palmyra, held in 2022 at the Malta Society of Arts in Val- letta, and her joint exhibition Lost Paradise with Henry Alamango at the il-Ħaġar Museum in Vic- toria, Gozo, in 2024, Mystique Blues confirms a sustained artistic commitment to examining how cultural ambition is inscribed, for- gotten, and sometimes violently overwritten. What has evolved is the painterly confidence with which these themes are handled. The works no longer ask us sim- ply to remember; they compel us to question what kind of urban future is being constructed in the process of forgetting. Ultimately, Mystique Blues is less an elegy than a proposition. It invites us to see the built envi- ronment not as expendable mat- ter, but as a fragile archive of col- lective imagination. In doing so, Troizky positions painting itself as a form of cultural stewardship, one capable of holding complexi- ty, contradiction, and unresolved tension in ways that policy and planning rarely can. Galina Troizky's art exhibi- tion runs until 2 February at the MUŻA which is Malta's Nation- al Community Art Museum and one of Heritage Malta's national sites and museums. Left to right: Mystique Blues,collage and acrylic on canvas, 2025 and Farewell Club Mystique, collage and acrylic, 2025