the things that shape to come
Marking a much-anticipated return, the things that shape to come is an exclusive premier that spans 14 years of John Vella’s works on canvas and paper. A rare and elusive artist, Vella has forged his career through incisive and profound observations that combine intelligent conceptual experimentation with virtuosic expressionist workmanship. Generously presented across multiple series, the show draws both from Vella’s archive and more recent pieces created during the pandemic and its aftermath.
By mining the inertia of bureaucracy to produce sublime acts of expression, Vella’s works offer a hopeful testimony to the irrepressible nature of creativity. His compositions are created by pressing, dragging, and tracing with the physical echoes of pieces of paperwork. The resulting artefacts capture his ritualised relationships with everyday relics of administration. This is a form of still life for our time, created through an earned intimacy with the documents, flowcharts, and spreadsheets that structure our waking hours much the way the fruits of harvest did those of his ancestors.
A collection of striking rectilinear canvases call to mind the aesthetics of the apps that populate our daily infinite scroll. These are the fallen icons that once lined the altar of productivity, as if left to melt in the rain or unceremoniously rolled over by a truck. Seductive cornflower blue, coral, and rose are washed with cold black and grey, as titles like humancapital, assetmanagement, and keyperformanceindicators press into the sensitive tissue of our collective corporate personhood.
Using acrylic and graphite, the series contacttracing reflects the intimate touch of myriad points of contact. Vella’s excessive handling of the canvas is both additive and subtractive, creating imagery suggestive of religious icons worn by generations of devotional touch. Works on paper see Vella using printed documents as literal tools to create stencils and fixtures, from which marks on the page are dragged, scraped, and extracted. Vella manages to produce an aesthetic that reclaims the notion of burnout: both in its metaphorical meaning, as a state of exhaustion brought about by hyper-productivity, and its literal meaning as a mark made by the friction of one material pressed against another.
Burnout requires force and power, a power which Vella confidently harnesses towards his own creative agenda. There is profound materiality to be found in these works, offering a prophetic encapsulation of our moment. The element spares us from the infinite. Collapse is not the endpoint, but rather a new beginning from which expression can flourish and rituals can renew.
