Josef Gatti Buontempo is an Italo-Maltese visual artist and poet who lives and works in Saint Julian’s, Malta. He has a B.A. in Italian and History from the University of Malta, 1998, and a Graduate Diploma in International Relations from London School of Economics, 2014.
Gatti Buontempo works predominantly in digital and analogue collage creating images that are aggregated reflections on contemporary life and visual culture. He blends references to current affairs, politics and fashion working with printed matter and onscreen imagery. His compositions are in constant dialogue with an art-historical lineage of painting, thinking through the conventions of landscape, figuration, portraiture and iconography. Abstraction, pattern and text are all used, in different ways, for both their graphic presence and narrative contribution to the works. The textual selections, in particular, move from concrete poetry to pictorial elements, relating diversely to marketing slogans, to considered private aspirations and to universal messages.
His works deal with the collision of modern living, capturing visual representations of travel, glamour and health, while bringing a spectrum of feelings related to our experience of life and marketing including those around success, loneliness, financial security and emotional wellbeing.
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