The Annunciation Of Collapse
The sacred encounter, rather than arriving with clarity and grace, becomes fragile, fractured, and uncertain—a meditation on the instability of our present condition.
Winner of the PRISMA Art Prize 2025 - Rome
The Annunciation of Collapse - Oil on canvas - 2024/25
The Annunciation of Collapse is an oil on canvas created in dialogue with Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. While his painting embodies balance, serenity, and the promise of divine revelation, mine unsettles this stillness and reframes the moment through a contemporary lens. The sacred encounter, rather than arriving with clarity and grace, becomes fragile, fractured, and uncertain—a meditation on the instability of our present condition.
This transformation stems from my home island Malta; an island at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, where for centuries empires, religions, cultures, and ethnicities have converged. Such a place carries with it a consciousness of history layered with resilience and vulnerability, endurance and collapse. My painting draws upon this context, merging local sensibilities with an international language that speaks to the shared human experience of precariousness.
Where Fra Angelico offered annunciation as the promise of transcendence, I reinterpret it as the unveiling of fragility; a reflection of a world where certainty gives way to dissonance, yet where beauty persists. It is in this tension, between collapse and the possibility of renewal, that my work comes alive.
On What Judgement? - Series of six works on Fabriano paper - 2025
