Raymond Pitrè has a longstanding interest in literature, including the works of James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Gabriel García Marques for their experimentation with the medium of writing as the record of one’s thoughts. And the medium of writing to explore reality was something Raymond Pitrè could ably translate through drawing. Negotiating and illustrating his visions through the liminal constancy, of what he calls ‘the distorting mirror’, his work expresses the intensity of his thinking patterns and emotive states. With artworks that tend to overlap and obtrude, Raymond Pitrè’s research process is grounded in autobiographical memory, single moments extracted from the continuum of human experience. Traces, trauma and the intensely personal are the realities captured on paper, plastic, cardboard, canvas or metal which manifest as intriguing, detailed, and at times disconcerting objects and images.

The MICAS in Conversation is a series of short conversations between art critic Rajesh Punj and a selection of Maltese and international artists on the involving effect of space on their art practice against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications.

MICAS is a Government of Malta infrastructural legacy project for the Culture and the Arts sector. MICAS will be realised through state funded restoration of historical fortifications and its galleries will be delivered in 2023. This project is part-financed by the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund – European Structural and Investment Funds 2014-2020.