Between Substance and Silence: A Conversation in Colour

In Vince Briffa’s paintings, colour does not simply fill a canvas – it performs. Each stroke becomes an act of translation, where emotion, vision and gesture merge to create a visual language uniquely his own. Following years of eventful practice and exhibitions that have taken his paintings, video art and installations to numerous international galleries and museums worldwide - including twice representing Malta at the Venice Biennale (1999 & 2019) – Briffa has, over the last decade, narrowed his artistic focus to painting. This shift marks a return to intimacy, where he continues to consolidate his unique language which fuses drawing and painting into a single act, and developing a mixture of materials that define his distinctive aesthetic.

Briffa’s academic art education in the United Kingdom instilled in him a lifelong commitment to the refinement of a specific act of seeing; shaping a personalised method of encountering and experiencing the world, one that focuses on colour - and its translation in paint - as the primary driver of emotional experience. This creative direction began with his early interest in impressionist painters’ interpretations of light and form, and was later refined through academic research into the intersection of the art and science of vision, as mediated by the artist’s physical gesture and the materiality of paint.

In a contemporary painting language, Briffa’s work investigates painting as a perpetual state of becoming, articulated through the intricate interweaving of visual perception, paint materiality, and the performance of hand and bodily gestures. Within his studio practice, he examines how paint and related materials, through deliberate intervention on the work’s surface, become the central premise of the artwork itself.

Briffa’s paintings operate at the crucial junction of matter and form, where the activity of working, erasing, reworking and constantly modifying materials is understood not as an imposition of theme or meaning but as movement through matter itself. This approach challenges more conventional notions and historical applications of matter in painting traditions, and positions the painting process and its result as the actual artwork, not signifying anything external to itself.

This organic creative process draws equally from subconscious visual and cultural influences and a deeply personal orientation toward abstraction. His cyclical method - always beginning with and returning to the medium - values material properties while remaining open to chance occurrences and interventions that emerge during creation.

Finally, after completing each piece, the artist purposefully adds complexity through playful metalinguistic titles that invite viewers to recognise specific visual, aesthetic, and historical influences in his process, further enriching the interpretive experience.

Vince Briffa is an artist, curator and a Professor of Art at the University of Malta. He is a Fellow of Civitella Ranieri Foundation in New York and an International Associate at CUT Contemporary Fine Arts Lab, University of Technology in Cyprus; the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture of Bilkent University, Turkey and the Scuola di Cinema, Accademia di Belle Arti in Catania.

*As Featured in the 8th Edition of the Malta Sotheby's International Realty Portfolio Magazine 2025*