Dreamscapes: a longing to get away from it all

Johanna Barthet is synonymous with the portrait genre and has become one of its leading prota­gonists in Malta. Her first solo exhibition in 2019, Stories Untold, introduced her to the art-loving public as a new voice in a genre that has often been overlooked or looked down upon as a commission-based one. Her personal way of tackling portraiture didn’t require sitters to pose in her studio. She searched and found her models on magazines and social media platforms like Instagram and gave them new life on her canvas. She became the pictorial storyteller by wresting these individuals away from their printed or pixelled context to impart on them a new existence away from their ‘imprisonment’, as protagonists in stories yet to be told. Two years later, Barthet’s second solo, Dreamscapes, finds the artist exploring new ground, away from portraiture, in the landscape genre. The title of the exhibition implies a similar approach to her first exhibition in the sense that these landscapes are not documentations of real, geographical places just as most of the people portrayed in Stories Untold originated from an alternative and virtual world. Some of the landscapes have intimations of...