The Bucket List

Antony Micallef’s dramatic, provocative paintings are loved by Angelina Jolie, James Franco and a host of other A-listers. Oliver Giles can see why.

- Angelina Jolie

IF YOU TAKE a look at his art, it’s clear that Antony Micallef is a little world-weary. Many of his paintings ridicule our culture of consumerism, while others are dark, depressing reflections on the horror of modern warfare. One particularly acerbic work depicts a little girl in front of a TV alongside the words “Sometimes I get worried about the world but then I just turn the channel”. For his latest exhibition, Raw Intent, Micallef tried to push his despair to one side.

“With all my other work, I think I was trying to illustrate a point,” Micallef muses. “And it all just started feeling like noise and I was just left saying: ‘Do I care anymore?’ Obviously I care as a person, but I needed to retract and think rather than paint about all this stuff. I just wanted to get back to painting and playing with paint. So with this body of work, it’s really about the paintings becoming objects themselves. I’ve never before used the quantity of paint that I’m using in this show. I had to spend thousands of pounds on paint and just throw it at the canvas.”

And when he says throw, Micallef means it literally. He chucked tube after tube and (for some of the larger works, bucket after bucket) of paint at the 22 canvases, then mixed it using brushes, squeegees and knives. On some of these new works the paint is 5cm deep, and it seems miraculous that the canvases haven’t buckled under the sheer weight of it. “The paintings are very, very sculptural,” Micallef admits. “The whole process was really physical.”