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1. What's been the most defining moment in your career so far? I represented Malta in two editions of the Venice Biennale and they were defining milestones. The 1999 edition was a huge eye-opener to the world of international contemporary art, when in parallel with my painting practice, I was also using video as a tool and working in installation. Techno- logically, the late 1990s presented huge challenges—it was the start of the transition from analogue to digital platforms, with all the problems of connectivity and alignment this brought about. As artists, we had little institutional backing. So, guaranteeing a successful presence amongst other national pavilions which, were hugely funded and also backed by a contemporary art ecology, was challenging to say the least. 20 years later, I returned to participate in the 2019 edition with a new video instal- lation. The experience was vastly different this time, shaped by enormous advances in technology and the support of a stable institutional backing. Outland won the pres- tigious Omaggio all'Arte ed all'Innovazione a Venezia 2019 by the Union of Honorary Consuls of Italy (UCOI) and the National Association of Young Innovators (ANGI). The COVID lockdown proved to be another defining moment. The sudden abundance of studio time shifted my focus and marked a return to painting as my primary practice. 2. As an artist, how do you navigate the world and speed of social media? My current show at the Malta Pavilion of the Malta Biennale looks closely at this relationship—the tension between my painting practice and the speed of tech- nology through the lens of contemporary landscape. The concept at the heart of FARO: Landscape Twice Refracted makes this question almost impossible to avoid. My practice is built on the accumulation of thousands of individual marks, each a small unit of attention, each painting taking months to resolve. Social media operates on precisely the opposite logic—the flash, the scroll, the vanishing post. The lighthouse rhythm, the work di- agnoses—flash, panic, darkness, repeat—is essentially a description of the feed. I won't pretend that I have resolved this cleanly. I live inside the contradiction. I use social media because invisibility isn't resistance but absence. But I've had to think carefully about what I post and how. A finished painting posted as a single image flattens everything the work is trying to do; it becomes another thumbnail competing for a fraction of a second of attention. So, increasingly I find myself drawn to process documentation; accumulation made visible over time, the surface building slowly across multiple posts, the work resisting the platform's hunger for the complete and the immediate. What I try to hold onto is the distinction be- tween using a tool and being used by it. The paintings set their own pace regardless of how they circulate online. The marks don't care about the algorithm, and perhaps that stubbornness is itself a quiet argument the work keeps making, even when compressed into a jpeg. 3. Do you consider artificial intelligence a threat to your career, or an opportunity? The honest answer is that I hold both possibilities at once, and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims otherwise. The threat is real but probably misunder- stood. AI doesn't particularly threaten the physical act of painting. What it threatens is the perceived value of that labour in a culture that has lost the value of slowness. If an image that takes seconds to generate is indistinguishable to a casual viewer from something that took months, then the argument for patience becomes harder to make. The market may not care about the difference, even if the work does. But this is where the case for painting needs to be made more forcefully, and on its own terms. Painting is not primarily a means of producing images. It is a process of think- ing, feeling, and being physically present with a problem over an extended period of time. Every mark is a decision, and the accumulation of those decisions over weeks and months produces a kind of knowledge that has no shortcut. The work carries that history in its surface; you can see it, and with time you can learn to read it. That is categorically different from a generated image, however sophisticated or pleasant to the eye. 4. How do you stay motivated and inspired, especially during tough times or when the work feels hard? Motivation is probably the wrong word for what sustains a serious practice. It implies something that needs topping up, a feeling you wait for or go looking for. What actually keeps you working is closer to habit; a com- mitment to showing up that doesn't depend on how you feel that morning. Frank Auerbach is known to have worked for 364 days a year. This surely wasn't a feat of extraordinary inspiration. It was the under- standing that the studio is where you live, and that presence itself is the work, even when nothing is being made—especially, when nothing is being made. The days when you sit with a failed painting and can't find a way in, when you scrape back and start again, when the work feels genuinely impossible; those days are not interruptions to the practice. They are the practice. 5. How do you balance your creative instincts with the expectations of your audience or collaborators? Honestly, the question of audience sits uncomfortably with me, and I think that discomfort is worth examining rather than smoothing over. If I'm making decisions in the studio based on what I imagine an audience expects, something has already gone wrong. Paint- ing demands a kind of radical honesty with the surface in front of you. The mark either works or it doesn't, and no amount of antic- ipated approval changes that. The moment external expectation enters the room, it tends to corrupt the very thing that makes the work worth looking at. Viewers are perceptive. They can feel when a painting has been made for them rather than out of genuine necessity. 6. How do you approach a new project? Do you have a specific process or routine you follow? The honest answer is that I don't follow a single routine. I follow the work, and try to stay alert to which mode it's asking for. Every project begins differently. I've learned to distrust a fixed process because the work tends to overshadow any system, I impose on it. With painting, I am the seeker. There is no established destination, no concept waiting to be illustrated. I'm searching for a language, mark by mark, and the paint- ing resists and redirects and occasionally surprises me into somewhere I couldn't have planned. It's fundamentally emotional in its logic; intuitive, accumulative, driven by what the surface demands rather than what I intended. When I work with other media—installa- tions, video, object-based work—something shifts. I become the finder rather than the seeker, starting with an established language or concept and following it until it fully unfolds. The route is more cerebral, more systematically thought through. I know roughly where I'm heading even if the details remain open. I find this dichotomy genuinely interesting because it maps onto two sides of my own nature. I'm always somewhere in between. 7. Can you let us in on some of the future projects, works? With Pierre Portelli, we are two artists headlining the Malta Pavilion at the Malta Biennale 2026. I have a series of large- scale paintings collectively titled FARO: Landscape Twice Refracted showing at the Camerone, in MUZA. Presently, I am also curating an exhibition at Spazju Kreattiv entitled For Want Of (not) Measuring. Also In 2026, I will be revisiting a major installation work originally presented at the Johanniterkirche in Feldkirch, Austria in 2012. It will be reimagined as a site-specif- ic, audiovisual installation and will reflect today's realities of faith as a decentralised authority, no longer as a single, uniform idea, but one that has stretched, fragment- ed, and migrated across religion, technolo- gy, culture, and personal identity. maltatoday | SUNDAY • 22 MARCH 2026 Theatre Malta Pavilion opens at Muza for Malta Biennale 2026 ARTS • TV • WHAT'S ON BY LAURA CALLEJA suggestions by email lcalleja@mediatoday.com.mt The Q & A VINCE BRIFFA 7 questions for... Extra round 8. Who are your biggest influences, and how have they shaped your work? There have been many, and at the same none. I say this as it's not the artist per se who has influenced my work, but it's the unique values im- bued in their work that resonate with me. In painting, Emilio Vedova for his fierce spontaneity and bold gesture; Cy Twombly for his poetic graphism; Giorgio Morandi for his silence; Anselm Kiefer for his monumentality; Joan Mitchell and Martha Jungwirth for their unrestrained instinctiveness; Claude Monet for his perception of light and form and Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff for their luscious use of paint. My influences are far more wide-rang- ing than the artworld. As an islander, I am enamoured by the myth of Odys- seus and his relationship with the fate of the sea and his concept of Home as something you return to again and again. Lastly, I am greatly influenced by philosophical thought and by poet- ry. Philosophy destabilises the given which the world around me perpe- trates and makes me notice what is overlooked, while poetry heightens my sensitivity to nuance and also expands the emotional registers that may not be accessible through visual observation alone. Vince Briffa is professor of art at the University of Malta. A multimedia artist, his work includes gallery and site-specific artwork, objects and installations which integrate drawing, painting, text, photography, sculpture and the moving image Art La Semana Santa de España in Mqabba Malta PAGE 2 PAGE 3 MaltaToday is supported by Arts Council Malta Vince Briffa (Photo: Bernard Polidano)