An ambiguity of expression takes on its own dynamic form in the work of Antony Micallef. It’s gestation at such a point that it clambers out of its two-dimensional cave in sculptural defiance of itself as a painting. Micallef achieves an extraordinary painterly plasticity with pure oil – shaped, folded and dried over many months – and then carefully constructed on the surface of his canvases with remarkable imitation of the human form. Confrontational, symmetrical, deliberately opaque yet decidedly driven by a design both physical and psychological, Micallef’s paintings resound in the torturous glory of their seductive realisation.