Kunst

18-Zepp Cassar

Zepp Cassars artistic process is crowded with memories of his life as an outsider, his childhood in a Maltese orphanage surrounded by sacred relics and the institutional discipline. His escape was through fleeting thoughts with vivid imagination of other worlds.
He arrived in Australia with all his belongings in a cardboard box. The vibrant light that bathed his experience in the new country fired his imagination which flowed into spontaneous drawing and painting using that large cardboard box as his first painting studio. He became an art teacher to other outsiders, autistic children. Watching them express themselves with paint, he saw the instinctive process that transfers emotions into art.
Zepp Cassar's drawings start with doodles and scribbles that develop creatively into a dense interplay of childhood memories expressed through texture, colour and enigmatic forms. Other themes are associated with animals, fables, and universal stories. The innocence and spontaneity of the outsider enrich life's experiences depicted by this gifted artist.
Zepp Cassar is particularly attracted by the expressive possibilities of texture to penetrate his personal world. Ink, wax, graphite, coloured pencils, printing and rubbing create layers of textures on recycled paper. To these textures are added vibrant or murky colours, instinctive unedited untrained and untamed patterns of lines or sometimes grotesque human shapes, images of personal recollections from unchartered meanderings of the subconscious.
Primary emotions recalled spontaneously through the memories and reactions of an outsider are the privileged dominant of Zepp Cassar's art practice. All viewers of his impressive range of drawings and paintings in this exhibition will be transformed by the creative leaps of his imagination.