Ghotja
27th March 2026 to 3rd April 2026
Kappella tal- Lunzjata, Balzan, Malta
Veronika is an abstract meditation on the Passion of Christ, drawing its emotional and symbolic impulse from the figure of Veronica, the woman traditionally remembered for her act of compassion along Christ’s path to Calvary. Rather than narrating the scene directly, the painting extracts its essence: suffering, mercy, witness, and sacred intimacy.
The work engages with the Baroque tradition of Passion imagery, where drama was carried through intensity of movement, deep chiaroscuro, emotional immediacy, and the physical presence of pain. In Baroque painting, the Passion was not only represented as an event, but as a visceral spiritual experience meant to move the viewer inwardly. Veronika takes these same concerns and translates them into abstraction. Instead of bodies, gestures, and faces, the painting offers a field of red, black, and darkened matter, where colour itself becomes flesh, wound, cloth, blood, and memory.
The dominant red surface evokes both sacrifice and devotion. It holds within it the violence of the Passion, but also its transcendence. Dark vertical traces rise and dissolve like blurred figures, wounds, or remnants of presence, suggesting an image that has been stripped of literal form yet remains charged with emotional and spiritual weight. In this way, the work approaches abstraction not as a departure from sacred art, but as a means of distillation: removing descriptive detail in order to preserve intensity.
The reference to Veronica is especially significant in this process. Her gesture in the Passion is one of contact, imprint, and compassion. Traditionally linked to the veil that bears the face of Christ, Veronica represents both the act of witnessing and the mysterious transfer of presence into image. Veronika reconsiders that idea through abstraction: the image is no longer a likeness, but a trace; no longer a face, but an atmosphere of encounter. What remains is not depiction, but residue of a memory.
