Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti invites viewers to explore a collection of works on paper by Arcangelo Sassolino at the Victor Pasmore Gallery, between the 10th of October 2025 and the 6th of January 2026.
Burning Waters presents a development of Diplomazjija Astuta—a collaborative installation curated by Keith Sciberras and Jeffrey Uslip for the Malta Pavilion of the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale. In this partial retelling, primarily through a series of works on paper, Arcangelo Sassolino’s (b. 1967) process of creation and transformation of matter is here being placed in dialogue with Victor Pasmore’s (1908–1998) own philosophy of the ‘independence of painting’.
The genesis for the setting of Sassolino’s imposing installation at the Venice Arsenale, in 2022, was lifted from Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s monumental altar painting for the Oratory of the Beheading of St John. Diplomazija Astuta was brutally cold in its metallic permanence, but essentially fiery and ephemeral in Sassolino’s fugitive dialogue between light and darkness, or between fire and water—a tension which is now being imprinted and burnt into paper. The signature material remains steel; however, the ephemeral act of transformation from solid to liquid state, and back through the cooling effect of water, is here taken a step further: the transformation of matter—of the signature—is the medium by which new compositions are drawn; it is the change in state, in condition, that is generative:
"What I am trying to capture is the change of state, that instant in which something is becoming something else, that energy and power that exist in the flash of absolute instability between the moments of equilibrium that are the before and the after... I want to free metal from that closed form, to expose its luminous liquid origin."
– Arcangelo Sassolino
In this new exhibition, Burning Waters, the ‘luminous liquid origin’, as it turns out, is akin to drawing. In the process of creating, the artist moves, adapts, and responds to the drops of fire, further echoing the spontaneous and liberating ‘dance of man in modern times’, to steal the title of another collection of Victor Pasmore’s (1908–1998) poetry. Thus, emerging directly from Diplomazija Astuta, this exhibition presents work that engages with the impact of drops of molten steel in its transfer from water to paper. The steel drops disintegrate into multiple droplets and explosive rapid streams, the thermal contact of which leaves traces across the paper and, often, burns through it. The resulting imagery on paper embodies the artist’s raving attempts to control the unpredictable effects of this impact, of the contact and velocity, and the irreconcilable conflict between steel, heat, and paper.
“Designs generated from chaos and speed… an action beyond control… it is only by directly holding the sheets of paper from the edges and manoeuvring them quickly, that one can attempt to control the rapid conflict and collision between these materials.”
– Arcangelo Sassolino
Such conflicts and convergences of materials, the resulting poetic forms, as well as the transition from figurative painting to abstraction, from political and metaphysical ideas to a visible and embodied artistic reality may equally be traced in Victor Pasmore’s own printed work, Burning Waters, produced in a mature phase of Pasmore’s visual language, based largely on biomorphic abstraction and architectural composition. The paradoxical title evokes the combination of fire and water, and, even more subtly, the shift from theological and biblical narrative into a more elemental representation of tension, rupture, and transformation—a shift that is likewise apparent in Sassolino’s work for this series. Burning Waters ultimately embodies Pasmore’s preoccupation with the phenomena of perception and control, as well as process-based composition, and a searching quest for meaning, for a kind of reconciliation:
‘But whose the tear and piercing cry
that splits the silence in the sky?’
Such questions find surprising resonances in Sassolino’s new work, where drops of molten steel, which once cut through the dark, are now imprinted on paper—the burns, the signature, of where fire falls.
A note on the process
The resulting imagery is that exhibited in works that are essentially the artist’s raving attempts to control the unpredictable effects of this impact, its thermal contact and velocity, and the resulting conflicts between steel, heat and paper:
“By letting drops of molten steel fall directly onto paper, I observed that it is possible to create extraordinary traces and marks. Drawings born of chaos and speed, which only the extreme heat of steel, when it meets a material as irreconcilable as paper, can produce. It is an uncontrolled action that unfolds with great rapidity. Depending on the height from which they strike the paper, the molten drops may disintegrate into thousands of incandescent sparks, leaving minuscule marks, or remain as a single mass that glides across the surface, trailing lines of every kind. In the latter case, at the precise moment when the drop stops moving and comes to rest, the paper instantly catches fire. To attempt to manage this clash of physical phenomena, one can intervene by adjusting the height and angle of impact—and the best way to do so is to hold the sheets of paper directly by their edges, moving them swiftly in an effort to contend with the rapid conflict and collision between these materials.”
– Arcangelo Sassolino
Arcangelo Sassolino
Arcangelo Sassolino’s work is the result of a close dialogue between art and physics. His interest in mechanics and technology opens up new meanings and possibilities for sculpture and its transformation. Speed, pressure, gravity, acceleration, and heat are the core of his artistic practice, which is always aimed at pushing against the limit of matter’s resistance to reveal its hidden nature of contrasts and opposing forces.
Arcangelo Sassolino was born in Vicenza (1967), where he currently lives and works.
Keith Sciberras
Sciberras is professor of art history at the Department of Art and Art History, University of Malta, where he is also Rector’s Delegate for the University’s Historic Building. Professor Sciberras is an Andrew W. Mellon Senior Fellow (2005) in European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, a Freedberg Scholar (2024) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and a former Trustee of the Association of Art Historians (AAH) London (2012). He has published extensively on the subject of Roman Baroque sculpture and Italian Baroque painting. Professor Sciberras contributed to numerous international research and exhibition projects on Italian Baroque Art and has curated dialogues with contemporary artists. Professor Sciberras was Team Leader of the Malta Pavilion for La Biennale di Venezia 2022.
Tina Camilleri
This exhibition is commissioned by Arts Council Malta, in collaboration with Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti.
Photography for Burning Waters: Diplomazija Astuta Retold by Kim Sammut
Photography for the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, Malta Pavilion by Agostino Osio, Alto Piano
