To find and unroll the thread which links us to nature and the place we occupy here, is what animates my creations. The tenuous thread where this poetry of nature, of our environment brings us back to the being, to a discussion between outside and inside. Contemplation is the core of my paintings. In my studio when I come back to the sensation of the fixed gaze I listen to a sort of harmony between what I put on the canvas or the volume and which is the response generated.
Inspired by the elements earth, air and water, mental landscapes take shape and open up new, more abstract spaces, reflections of our intimate sensations. The mediums I use such as walnut stain, ink, wax, pigments binding acrylic and oil, ash and paper allow a back and forth between controlled gesture and random appearance. Their interest lies in their capacity of interaction, mixing, dispersion and erasure.
Between intimate and universal trying to find a path which allowed us to create his own path of painting.
Between earth and sky: A feeling of matter
The power of the mineral is omnipresent in Denis Zammit’s works. All immersed in his place of life, inhabited by the telluric forces of the nearby mountain, with its strata, its meanders, its soft and powerful forms, its halo of whiteness, Denis transcribes in fervour and passion his sensations and emotions. His paintings speak of the earth and the sky, of the rock that stands in between, sometimes imposing itself, white, grey or ochre, lined with ash or wax, following the painter’s inspiration. Magic works… the gaze plunges into infinity, has difficulty detaching itself from it… a space of calm and serenity emerges from the painting, giving free rein to reverie, to meditation… An invitation to share Denis Zammit’s intimate garden. Daisy Froger-Droz
In the way of these « dream stones » from China or Japan, Denis Zammit’s paintings introduce us into spaces mimetically related to « landscapes », mirors of an interiority where coloured areas are concretized, pushed towards the greatest abstraction by the use of blurred colours, layered in suites of horizontal zonings. The coloured materials integrate all density, degradation, erosion, dilution, collusion, dispersion, with transparencies that sometimes thwart subtle ranges of opacity. These are always stratified in horizontal planes such as terrestrial sediments. And at the same time as the gaze lets itself be drawn into the reverie of the distant, by an inversion of perception, one can plunge into other reveries just as well where the force of details leads to unfathomable depths. There is the game that creates the efflorescence of inexhaustible, suspended and recreated worlds. Joël-Claude Meffre