The Brutality of Appearance: Antony Micallef’s Self-Portraits

Excerpt from Essay by Paul Moorhouse
Paul Moorhouse is Senior Curator of 20th-Century Collections and Head of Collections Displays at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Micallef’s art may be viewed in the context of the developments pioneered by
Bacon and others, taking its place within an artistic outlook that it both shares and, in its own way, extends. Finding his mature voice in the 1940s, Bacon echoed ideas explored by Alberto Giacometti. Working in Paris in proximity to existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Giacometti emphasised the importance of intense involvement with recording his private sensations.

In another respect there is a critical difference between Micallef’s approach and that of these older painters, with whom he has an affinity. The work of Bacon, Auerbach and Kossoff has an expressive power that arises from the literal evidence of the paint itself. In common with these artists, Micallef also insists on the materiality of the medium. However, by implying the appearance of photography, he introduces a further expressive dimension. His backgrounds are painted thinly, and suggest a space rendered in soft focus.
This is a vital distinction, and in Micallef’s work it gives rise to a compelling visual tension. His dense textures and rich palette of pinks,reds and whites assert the sensuous substance of paint, and has a seductive beauty.

His portraits assert themselves as extremely tactile paintings, and yet in a surprising development they veer towards their opposite: a precisely expressed image of a figure situated in space, casting a shadow, its appearance devastated. The fact of paint and the suggestion of photography are combined, generating a highly charged, if ambiguous, relationship. That paradox stands at the centre of Micallef’s paintings, and is an essential aspect of their power to move and disturb the viewer..
The imagery that defines the contemporary world is bewildering in its complexity. It ranges from what Micallef has described as the ‘frivolities of pop culture’ to the excesses and darker undercurrents to which the world-wide web is an open door.
Yet, as before, the profusion of photographs has a bearing on the way we look at the world and experience it. His self-portraits are convulsed by raw feeling, and in that way they transcend the ‘frivolities’ of a world entertained by selfies.
But there is a deeper purpose.
Engaging with the tradition of portraiture, Micallef macerates in order to reinvent and renew.