Instinctive and intuitive by Mr. E.V.Borg (Art Critic)

For Denis Calleja the wheel of fire has turned full circle. The stress, strain and tension in the various jobs and tasks undertaken has matured and intensified his creative potential, he has adopted a graphic technique to express his inner feelings and emotions.  Sensitive, kind and generous, he works with enthusiasm and achieves a delicate, fragile but refined idiom. Denis has a natural inclination for pen sketching and drawing. His impulsive spontaneous approach, coupled with improvisation, endows his work with the freshness of gestural or action painting. Such freedom adds excitement to his abstract expressionist approach. Yet his work is, to a certain extent, primitive or naïve. Essentially it is a graphical expression that borders on embroidery with an exotic decorative abstract quality laced with glitter. His linear work develops into an elaborate texture. Line is exploited to produce shapes and forms that become basic modules in an elaborate pattern with intense rhythm and movement. His fantastic and imaginative abstract compositions often develop into recognizable forms with figurative connotations. And works that resemble sea creatures, plants, birds and human forms can hardly be called non-figurative, even if the result is accidental. However it is quite obvious that Denis is not really interested in figurative representation or realism. His art is a consummate form of doodling to achieve a plane of meditation, contemplation or reflection. Probably such doodling becomes useful therapy against the anxiety and tension of modern living. For Calleja, composing music on his piano in the restful silence of his drawing room, as well as graphical expression, are auxiliary palliative towards achieving an inner peace. The calligraphy in Calleja's dialectic is quite similar in effect to that of ancient Greek artists, especially the graffito technique on pottery. The repeated decorative ring  modules in a pattern (as the chain-mail in Exekias' portrayal of Achilles killing Penthesilea) are reminiscent in effect to the mantra or the visual image of a mandala in Eastern meditation.

The graphical modules in an analogy with a litany of repeating the same sound induce the same result. The repeated sound and gesture or movement produce a kind of trans as the dynamics of graphical patterned decoration coupled to movement as stimulated by optical illusion (OP).  Indeed, Denis' work exudes a similar effect: a hypnotic and hallucinatory effect. What are the merits of his work? Could it be termed creative or original? Since it is gestural, improvised, spontaneous and automatic it emanates a certain undeniable freshness. Denis is really self-taught, and therefore is not conditioned by academic exercises as practiced in an art class. His influence is remote, primitive, intuitive and instinctive. Perhaps one feels that the conscious, prevalent tradition or taste and modern expression do not contribute to his dialectic.

But if one accepts the decoration or texture as used in Greek, Byzantine and Aboriginal art one realizes why certain works by Denis emit a classical echo. An accurate analysis of repeated decorative modules in Calleja's work reveals a historical continuum. Pure or total freedom in his expression suffers, even if Denis applies historical solutions unconsciously or discovers them accidentally. If his solutions are the result of trial and error we find him struggling against odds going through the stages that Paleolithic and Neolithic artists adopted. Denis uses the V and the rhombus, the most basic of signs. Quite often he resorts to an infinite outline - one gestural act without stopping. This produces the difficulties of hard-edge where the artist is confronted with distinct unconnected shapes and forms. Thus he finds himself constrained to improvise other doodles to fill intervening spaces and join these disparate shapes into one composition. Such problems highlight the pure graphic quality of his expression and his application of cross-hatching and texture to achieve what other artists obtain through colour. Denis' best work has an oriental flavour and the qualities of Eastern art.