Mario Abela still owns a copy of Paint and Draw with Tony Hart, which his sister brought home as a school prize. As a child, he spent hours drawing and painting from its pages, already fixed on the idea of making images like the ones before him. What followed was not a conventional trajectory of early prodigy but a career built in stages.
Born and raised on the island of Gozo, Malta, where Neolithic temples, Baroque churches and British fortifications coexist within a few square miles, it is perhaps no coincidence that his work returns so consistently to layered history and the weight of the past.
His route into painting was neither conventional nor rapid. After studying art and history, he completed a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Arts. For more than fifteen years he worked as a freelance graphic designer before turning his full attention to painting. That period sharpened his visual discipline, but it also clarified what commercial work could not offer: the freedom to leave work unresolved.
Abela describes himself as primarily self-taught in painting and drawing techniques, developing his approach through persistent experimentation, treating subtraction as seriously as accumulation. Charcoal is central to his process, not as preparatory mark-making but as an active material within the finished work. Visible beneath glazes and resurfacing through scraped oil, it anchors the image as paint builds above it. If a figure becomes too definite, he takes it apart. His preparatory process draws on sketching and collage, both physical and digital, alongside close study of historical fragments that carry a particular tension.
The human figure dominates Abela’s canvases, though rarely as a stable or idealised protagonist. Solitary bodies or small groups inhabit shifting interiors and indeterminate spaces, their poses drawn from classical and Renaissance precedents while resisting the polish of those sources. Religious iconography appears frequently, reimagined rather than reproduced. Motifs such as The Annunciation, the Pietà and Saint Sebastian serve as structural frameworks for exploring vulnerability and collapse rather than devotional themes.
The artists he consistently draws on share the same preoccupation with the figure under pressure: Rubens treats the body as a vessel of religious and historical force; Bacon subjects it to psychological pressure; Bosch builds entire worlds from anxiety and imagination. Among contemporaries, Adrian Ghenie and Jenny Saville extend this enquiry into trauma and anti-idealisation. For Abela these are not superficial influences but reference points for understanding what a canvas can hold.
He describes his own approach as para-baroque: not a style, but a condition in which Baroque intensity and contemporary overload refuse easy resolution. His work confronts historical imagery with the turbulence of today’s politics, culture, religion and the dissonance of the information age, exploring what he calls the fragile intersection of beauty and collapse.
His ongoing series Notes from the Anthropocene extends this into contemporary territory. Rather than addressing environmental crisis directly, the project examines how individuals situate themselves psychologically within forces larger than themselves, resisting illustration in favour of ambiguity and sensation. Painting also serves as a counterweight to the speed and excess of digital imagery. That digital tools inform his research, sketching and collage is no contradiction; the work itself remains resolutely material.
A view of Mario Abela’s studio, offering a glimpse into the spaces and materials that shape his practice.
Abela has exhibited in Florence, Berlin, Venice, Valletta and Gozo. He received the PRISMA Art Prize in Rome and CREA OPEN in Venice, reached the final of the Hopper Prize in the United States, was named among Aesthetica Magazine’s Future Now Top 100 artists, and is a brand ambassador for Cretacolor Vienna. In 2025 he returned to Art..e Gallery in Gozo — the same venue where he showed a decade earlier — for Childhood’s End, a solo exhibition that served as a considered marker of how far the practice had travelled. In 2026 he participated in Nothing is Clear at Axis Gallery in Malta, a group exhibition curated by Elyse Tonna as part of the Malta Biennale.
In conversation with The Exclusivist, the artist discusses the para-baroque, the transformation of historical sources, why failure and subtraction are as central to his practice as accumulation, and what paint can communicate that representation cannot.
Q&A with Mario Abela
The Mindset for Painting
Your work often carries a sense of tension—images holding themselves together under pressure. Do you need to be in a particular state of mind to begin working, or does the act of painting bring you into that state?
I don’t think I’ve ever been someone who waits for inspiration to arrive before entering the studio. If I waited for the perfect state of mind, very little work would get done. For me, painting is what creates that state. I might arrive distracted, preoccupied with teaching, family life, or the countless practical concerns that accompany being a human being, but once I begin working, those things gradually recede. The painting demands a different kind of attention.
The tension that people often notice in my work probably emerges from this process. I’m fascinated by moments where things seem suspended between order and disorder, certainty and doubt. We live in a world that encourages quick conclusions and immediate reactions, yet painting asks for the opposite. It requires patience, hesitation and a willingness to remain with uncertainty.
Often I begin with only a loose idea of where a painting might go. The image evolves through a series of decisions, revisions and unexpected discoveries. Some passages are built up carefully, while others appear almost by accident. What interests me is that fragile balance where control and unpredictability coexist. In many ways, the paintings become records of that negotiation.
The studio is one of the few places where I allow myself the luxury of slowing down. Painting isn’t an escape from reality; it’s a way of paying closer attention to it. The state of mind I’m looking for isn’t something I find before painting—it is something the act of painting itself produces.
Reinterprets the Annunciation through the language of breakdown rather than revelation, shifting the moment from divine arrival to structural or psychological rupture.
Criteria for an Image
You’ve described the Anthropocene as a set of pressures rather than a subject. How do those pressures shape the kinds of images you go looking for in books and art history: what feels charged, what feels unusable, and what makes a source worth bringing into the studio at all?
I’m constantly collecting images. Some come from books, others from the internet, old catalogues and magazines, personal photographs or fragments encountered almost by chance. What attracts me is rarely an image’s obvious subject matter. More often, it’s a detail that feels unresolved, something that lingers in the mind long after you’ve turned the page.
I think we’re surrounded by images today in a way that is unprecedented. Most are consumed instantly and forgotten just as quickly. The images that interest me are those that resist that cycle. They possess a certain ambiguity or tension that prevents them from revealing everything at once.
When I speak about the Anthropocene, I’m thinking about the overlapping pressures that define contemporary existence: ecological, political, technological and cultural. Those pressures often reveal themselves indirectly. They can be found in historical images just as easily as contemporary ones. I’m interested in how images carry traces of human behaviour, belief systems and ways of seeing the world.
This is closely related to what I have described as the para-baroque. I don’t use the term to describe a style of painting. Rather, it refers to a condition of contemporary life. Like the historical Baroque, we inhabit a world shaped by spectacle, instability and competing narratives. The difference is that today these forces are intensified by digital technologies, social media and the relentless flow of information. We are constantly navigating excess: of images, opinions, crises and distractions. The images that attract me are often those that reveal something about how we live within that condition rather than simply documenting it.
An image becomes worth bringing into the studio when it continues to ask questions. If it feels too complete, too obvious or too illustrative, I usually lose interest. The best source material leaves room for uncertainty. It allows the painting to become something more than an interpretation of an image; it becomes a conversation with it.
Revisits the figure of Saint Sebastian as a site of vulnerability and endurance, using the body as a carrier of pain, resilience, and suspended transformation.
Working With Historical Imagery
You often begin with historical images. When you bring those sources into a painting, what determines what you keep, what you break down, and what you let disappear as the image becomes your own?
History has always fascinated me, perhaps because I originally trained as both an art teacher and a history teacher. Historical images offer more than visual information; they carry stories, ideologies and traces of the societies that produced them. They’re never neutral. Even the most familiar image has accumulated layers of interpretation over time. When I begin working with a historical source, I don’t approach it with a fixed plan. The process is often exploratory. Some elements immediately feel essential and survive throughout the painting, while others gradually disappear. Sometimes a small detail becomes more important than the image as a whole.
What interests me is the moment when a historical image stops functioning as a document and starts functioning as material. At that point, it becomes available for transformation. The painting isn’t attempting to reconstruct the past; rather, it’s exploring how the past continues to shape the present. I think we often imagine history as something settled and complete, but in reality we’re constantly rewriting our relationship with it. Painting allows me to participate in that process. The historical source remains present, but it enters into a dialogue with contemporary concerns, personal experiences and the unpredictable nature of paint itself.
A meditation on self-image and responsibility, drawing on Caravaggio’s Narcissus and Michelangelo’s Pietà. The painting considers narcissism within an image-driven culture, where visibility becomes a form of power and the self is both subject and burden.
Material With Its Own Anatomy
Even when there’s no figure present, your paintings can feel strangely bodily, as though the material itself carries a kind of internal anatomy or tension. What draws you to that register, and what does it allow the work to do that a recognisable image cannot?
One of the reasons I continue to paint is that paint remains endlessly surprising. No matter how much experience you acquire, the material retains a degree of independence. It has weight, texture and behaviour that can’t be entirely controlled.
I’m interested in allowing those qualities to remain visible. Even in paintings where recognisable imagery is present, I want viewers to remain aware of the physical reality of the surface. A painting should not simply function as a window onto an image; it should also exist as an object with its own presence.
The idea of a painting possessing an internal anatomy is something I find particularly compelling. Just as the human body contains structures hidden beneath the skin, a painting contains layers, revisions and traces beneath its visible surface. Those hidden histories contribute to its character.
Material can often communicate experiences that are difficult to articulate through representation alone. A gesture, a texture or a passage of paint can evoke vulnerability, tension or instability without needing to describe them directly. That ambiguity interests me. It allows viewers to engage with the work on a sensory and emotional level rather than simply searching for a narrative explanation.
A study of instability at the point where structure begins to fail. The work suggests psychological and formal fragmentation, where coherence is continually undermined by internal and external pressures.
Stepping Away
Your working rhythm includes periods of stepping away before re-engaging with a painting. Is that pause about gaining enough detachment from authorship to see the work more objectively, or about re-emerging and returning with the clarity needed to decide what should happen next? And how long do those intervals tend to be. Do you work on other paintings in the meantime, or do you step away from everything for a while?
Stepping away from a painting is absolutely essential for me. When you’ve spent days or weeks looking at the same surface, you gradually lose the ability to judge it objectively. Everything begins to feel familiar, and familiarity can be surprisingly deceptive.
Distance allows me to return with fresh eyes. Sometimes that means leaving a painting untouched for a few days, while other works might remain in the studio for months before I feel ready to continue. During those periods I’m rarely inactive. I’m usually working on other paintings, reading, visiting exhibitions or gathering material that may eventually find its way into future work.
Often the most useful decisions happen away from the easel. I’ll find myself thinking about a painting while listening to an audiobook while I am on my bicycle or motorcycle or simply walking. The mind continues to work on problems even when you’re not consciously focused on them. I don’t see these pauses as interruptions. They’re part of the process itself. Painting requires periods of intensity, but it also requires moments of reflection. Returning to a work after an absence allows me to encounter it almost as a stranger would. Those moments of renewed clarity are often when the most important decisions are made.
Process and Perception
Looking at the finished work, it can be diIicult to imagine how it was made. What part of your process would most surprise someone who only knows the paintings in their final form?
I think most people would be surprised by how much uncertainty and failure are involved. We tend to encounter artworks only once they’ve reached a finished state, which creates the impression that the artist always knew where they were heading. In reality, that’s rarely the case. Many of my paintings go through multiple transformations before arriving at their final form. Entire images disappear beneath later layers. Areas that appear effortless may have been repainted dozens of times. Sometimes a painting only begins to work after I’ve abandoned my original intentions for it.
There’s a tendency to think of painting as a process of adding things, but quite often it’s a process of subtraction. The challenge isn’t simply creating an image; it’s recognising what can be removed. Some of the most important decisions involve letting go of passages that may have taken days to make.
What remains visible in the finished work is only a fraction of its history. Beneath the surface are countless revisions, doubts, discoveries and changes of direction. That’s one of the things I find most compelling about painting. It records not only what was decided, but also the traces of everything that might have been.
The Longer View
Abela’s practice sits at the intersection of figurative painting, art history and contemporary anxiety. The work is neither decorative nor didactic; it carries weight through material presence and psychological tension. His trajectory has been patient and methodical, and the paintings reflect that: considered, unhurried, and accumulating a reputation to match.
Featured painting: Childhood’s End Oil on canvas, 120×150 cm 2024-2025 © Mario Abela
A reflection on formative memory and early perception, where innocence and awareness begin to blur. The work treats childhood not as origin, but as a space of unresolved looking.
Official Website: Mario Abela | Instagram
