Antony Micallef

Excavating an Aura

Nearing the end of a decade that’s felt like a lifetime, it feels like our world has grown weary. A once-omnipresent optimism has given way to an absurd kind of acceptance, and each time there appears to be an answer, it is just as quickly hosed down the ideological stream into obscurity. Echoing many before him, the prolific singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy once crooned, “Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world,” and this is certainly not the only time we’ve imagined that it might all be coming to halt. The fact that many of us have heard that sentiment, regardless of our familiarity with Wilco, might signal that this too shall pass, but, boy, it sure doesn’t feel like it.

When the world hits times like these, artists get to work, gathering the pure feeling from the volksgeist and naming it with their work. The British painter Antony Micallef has consistently dug his hands into the proverbial soil, excavating biting social commentaries for the better part of the last two decades. However, in recent years, Micallef has imbued his paintings with a raw, personal emotion that cannot be ignored. They seem to communicate a direct confrontation with our collective suffering, translating the confusion, exhaustion, and pain into an image that speaks at deafening volume. Days spent covered in paint, drained from the emotionally and physically taxing process, he brings such feelings to light, or, in his own words, he “unearths them.” His powerful portraits bring the conversation from collective alienation to communal understanding, stripping the subject of everything but its humanity. In the same way that the boogeyman is scary because no one knows what he looks like, so are fears that we cannot describe. Micallef shows us the face of the boogeyman, so that we might remember that the human spirit contains immaculate beauty in its imperfection.