Aux Armes presents two artists side by side in the Upper Galleries of St James Cavalier in Valletta, Malta. It is not a coincidence that the site - a historic military cavalier built by the Knights of St John to defend the new city of Valletta and later transformed into a creative cultural hub - is being used for an artistic project that bridges the work of a Maltese artist and a French artist working in the 21st century. Aux Armes is naturally a clarion call, a political statement replete with a kind of patriotism that is viewed with some irony in the West and yet has recently been revived with a great deal of earnestness in the Arab Spring. Aux Armes is about the appropriation of political statements and monumental forms that perhaps have lost some of their power in Western societies, about architectural forms that compartmentalise life and transform themselves into treacherous weapons.
Baptiste Debombourg’s drawings “Tradition of Excellence” create a visual pun by linking two borrowed forms: the outline of firearms used in the twentieth century to kill thousands, possibly, millions of people, and ground plan drawings that we are accustomed to seeing in architects’ offices.
Saw this exhibition yesterday by mere chance. I have to say I was quite intrigued/captivated.
