Shaun Grech- Gallery

My Own People
by Teodor Reljic

MaltaNow
March 2006

Shaun Grech is self-taught. He has an impulsive urge to paint. He’s incredibly prolific, and he doesn’t paint horses. Nor flowers. Nor ‘Mdinas’. He likes painting “figures that are full of pain” because “that’s what’s real to me.” Sound familiar? Yes it does. It’s what Bohemian myths are made of. And oh! He’s topical too – just look at ‘He-ho from Guantanamo’ and ‘Fuck Me, I’m a Yankee’. But does his work consist of angst-ridden portraits that could have been done by your average 15-year old goth? It most definitely does not.

“I’m not a leftist or a pseudo-Marxist or whatever…I don’t wear Che Guevara T-shirts, I’ve grown up basically.” We needn’t fret for the well-being of his left ear, then.

He leads me to the gallery in Melita Street, Valletta which hosts his latest exhibition (‘Pictures from the Outside’), wearing a week’s stubble, a black beanie clamping down his scruffy hair. While not as abysmally noir-ish as the bowels of Floriana, this part of Valletta boasts a sense of natural decay – something the house used for the exhibition also possesses. Not to suggest that the paintings are bleak, but the venue suits them. Probably because they wouldn’t benefit from a ‘polished’ presentation. Hell, Grech doesn’t even use an easel. “I quite dislike it, actually. Most of my paintings come in bursts of energy. I could get the urge to paint while I’m in my car, and do it in that confined space…” And from the looks of it, he gets that urge quite often.

The paintings on display here, 43 of them, were all done in the span of a year. “I’m very restless, I’m not the type to say ‘today I’m gonna paint because I have to.’” He can spend from fifteen minutes to weeks on a single painting (“when I’m in a bit of an obsessive mood”). This could be attributed to his self-confessed moodiness, but having no academic experience is what’s ultimately so liberating. “I like to say that my lack of technical knowledge is a major advantage because I don’t have any barriers, I can do what I want, I’m free.” One other thing that keeps him from collapsing into a ‘tortured artist’ cliché is probably the fact that he’s very much connected to the outside world. He runs his own NGO called Integra foundation, whose aim is to: “facilitate the psychosocial integration of all marginalized populations into mainstream society”. It comes as no surprise, then, that the themes of poverty, marginalization and racism are some of the main themes behind his work. “I’m not interested in perfect people. I’m interested in the poor one, the dirty one, the one who doesn’t fit.” It’s very tempting to classify his work as provocative, whose aim is only shock-value. “I think a lot of people have a tendency to say ‘they’re aggressive, they’re scary – I don’t see anything scary in them. For me they are people – they’re human and I’m painting people the way I see them. These people might be figments of my imagination but they’re my own people.” Grech has no hidden agenda – he barely got around to exhibiting, in fact. “I’m quite an introverted person by nature, what happened was I made a website, to have a little gallery. Then this gallery owner saw it and invited me to do an exhibition…” This resulted in ‘Deviations’, which took place last December at the Gallery Last Touch in Mosta. Knowing how productive Grech is, the paintings have been piling up at home for quite some time. “My dad was pretty happy: ‘go, go exhibit. Get this stuff out of here.’”

He thinks Malta is a very artistically constipated country, so he was pleased to find, during ‘Pictures from the Outside’, that there are people on the island who are doing something different. “I think the only difference between other people and myself is that I just said a very big ‘f*** it’, I’m just gonna go out there.” He had lived and worked in Guatemala for two years (“it inspired me in terms of the bright colours that I use”). He’ll be going back there again for a couple of months in some remote village, which he finds a welcome change from Malta. In fact, Maltese apathy and his work with Integra are his main driving-force. He believes that art should provoke some sort of reaction, “even if it’s disgust.” He finds indifference offensive, something that is very easy to slip into when faced with a barrage of paintings of Luzzus, Mdinas and Cominos. Perhaps someone as in-your-face and as visceral as Grech is a good wake-up call, as the feedback he received from the exhibition seems to suggest.

Apart from Integra, Shaun is also finishing his Masters, which is an Msc in Managing Rural Development at Imperial College London. The rest of his time is spent painting, mostly.

“As far back as I could remember I’ve been experimenting with paints and messing things up basically.” He’s happy with his system, if one can call it that. “I’ve started off with a blank canvas and hope to continue starting with a blank canvas. It’s life, it’s people I meet and I like to say that the world is such a screwed-up place, it’s difficult not to find inspiration.” Of course he didn’t actually say ‘screwed-up’.

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