WE STARTED A FIRE

BEAUTY IS A NONVIOLENT EXPERIENCE OF NEAR DEATH, A WARNING THAT ONE IS FRAGILE, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE.

Timothy Morton, Realist Magic, 2013

All we did was start a fire.

The work of Kane Cali positions us at the crossroads between several forces and realities — the natural and man-made; the whole and the fragment; the hopeful and the dystopian; our collective past and an unknown future; intention and chance; the digital and the tactile; the pursuit of beauty and the onset of disaster.  

What Cali references at the start of his process is the discovery of fire. The energy that has grown since that moment has given agency to humankind for millenia—agency to thrive, to find light, to create warmth, to prepare sustenance. As he creates his work, he is watching images of forest fires destroying the land around us, heat swarming the globe and an anthropocene that is unable to escape its reliance on fossil fuels.

The ‘hyper-object’, as coined by Timothy Morton, refers to emergent phenomena which eclipse our own understanding of them. As their scale, complexity and non-local nature grow, the perception of their potential harm seems to evaporate. It is for this reason that Cali positions the art historical reference of the bust within this body of work. The figurative has before been at the heart of Kane Cali’s practice. For this project he seems to propose a moment of awareness—a frozen second within two infinite poles racing in either direction; his subjects immortalised in an uncertain trajectory of time.

But what is his point? Where do we go from here? 

The work in this exhibition seems to elevate the experience of existential dread to a resolute calmness. It takes the collective psyche and freezes it, to acknowledge how beyond the individual this reality might be. In that understanding, the spectator finds a moment of empowerment — an agency to appreciate more acutely the role they play within a massive, but cyclical process.

The context the work is displayed in continues to build on this. The School of Art in Valletta has been a cradle of Maltese art production since the early 20th Century. Here, the careers of so many found their beginnings. The work Cali is showing is juxtaposed across spaces of tuition and amongst casts and busts. They are in stoic confrontation with a loaded history. Here, the hands that carve and shape, paint and shade, reach out to shake those that script to sculpt, scan to see.

I see in this work three distinct moments: the friction at the initial spark, the accelerated moment of combustion and the ashes as they submit to gravity in an irreversible pile. The beginnings of this element, caught by the wind and spelling prosperity for a whole species, holds the same potential to eliminate the very ecosystem that sustains its existence. This potential is embedded within the material nature of the work. Condensed stories of time, knowledge and energy find themselves fixed within a new reality. Clay, marble, charcoal — whether the real or its counterfeit equivalent — take on a fragile embodiment, one which echoes the same fragile danger of a raging flame. This material choice takes us to a different colour experience to what we have previously seen from Cali. The work loses the candy-like lustre we have come to expect from him. In its place we find raw, flawed residue; fragments of human intervention upon natural and digital landscapes. Perhaps this is best expressed in the found concrete works from which his subjects emerge.

This is a critical moment which he is placing us at. As evolution takes us forward, he seems to express that we are at a cusp. Our evolutionary history has been determined by the ability to harness the potential of our natural world for our own benefit. This project warns us of the potential it can have to de-evolutionise it. So far the breaks and collapses he proposes are just a simulation — but he seems to infer that we lie just at its threshold.

All we did was start a fire.