#5 · Gabriel Buttigieg — Visual Artist • Photos by Bernard Gatt • Location: Paola, Malta.
Across the Medium is Stradalia’s series of quiet stories shot with artists and makers—short photo essays paired with a brief write-up.
The studio is easy to miss from the outside. Inside, the light is low. Reference images cover the walls. Plants sit in almost every corners. Symbols pinned to various surfaces. A large canvas stands in the room, it’s in its very early stage, carrying only the first traces of what it might become.
Gabriel describes the studio as a mirror of himself. It was given to him by his father, who has supported his work from the very beginning, and over time it has become more than a place to paint. It is where he spends most of his days, welcomes visitors, and builds the world that surrounds his work.
Music fills that world constantly. He describes it less as culture and more as necessity, something present from the moment he wakes until he falls asleep. As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a musician. These days he expresses himself through painting instead, though music remains inseparable from the process, shaping the mood and energy with which he approaches the canvas.
The path towards painting was not straightforward. Gabriel abandoned two university courses before eventually finding his way to psychology, a subject that spoke to him in a language he understood. Looking back, he sees those years of uncertainty as essential. They forced him to commit fully to art before he had found a clear visual language, before he knew exactly what kind of artist he wanted to become. Psychology later became part of that search, opening new ways of understanding both himself and the themes that would emerge in his work.
That search has taken many forms. Early paintings were direct and expressionistic, driven by questions about existence and mortality. Later came an intense fascination with symbols and references drawn from mythology, philosophy, history and anthropology. More recently, his attention has shifted again. Today he is interested in bringing these different stages together while leaving greater room for instinct. Rather than guiding the viewer through fixed meanings, he wants the work to remain open enough for personal interpretation.
The physical act of painting remains central. Gabriel speaks openly about the aggression present in his work. Sometimes it appears in the subject matter, sometimes in the line itself, but often it reveals itself through the process. Looking around the studio, it is easy to understand what he means. Paintings are built through movement and force as much as thought and reflection.
Mythology and psychology meet naturally within this approach. For Gabriel, mythology offers one of the most honest portraits of human nature, populated by flawed gods whose strengths and weaknesses mirror our own. Psychology provides another way of examining those same impulses, particularly the parts of ourselves we prefer to keep hidden. Together they form a framework through which much of his work is understood.
The large canvas standing in the studio will eventually become something else entirely. Gabriel admits he rarely knows where a painting will end when it first begins. The blank surface brings equal measures of excitement and anxiety. Sometimes he spends hours looking before making the first mark.
One painting leads to another, one series to the next. The work continues because he continues to change. As he puts it, he is no longer the person he was a year ago, and in another year he will be someone different again.
Like the beginning of a painting, its ending is difficult to define. Gabriel doesn’t believe perfection exists. Knowing when a work is finished comes down to instinct, a feeling rather than a decision. The painting simply reaches a point where it becomes, in his words, good enough.
