Elisa Abela

“Critique of Animals. I am afraid that the animals consider man as a being like themselves who has lost in a most dangerous way his healthy animal common sense—they see in him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the unhappy animal.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Where do Elisa Abela’s animals come from? When, how, and where did she encounter them?
Tracing her artistic and exhibition history, I first encounter a cat taking center stage in her second solo show in Catania in 2010: Smitty il gatto e altre storie (Smitty the Cat and Other Stories). At that time, Elisa’s main visual language was collage, and all her figures and narratives were created by sifting through, fragmenting, and recombining a pre-existing world of images and paper.

A decade later, in the artist’s book For Adults only, domestic animals take on supporting roles in small tableaux depicting a strangely intertwined humanity: scenes of sexual life, couplings, and other combinations, all drawn in a boldly childlike style.

Abela’s engagement with the animal world originally reflects her vocation for revisiting the fairy tales, dreams, and nightmares of our childhood.

While this process of rewriting was largely playful, combinatory, and even freely experimental, the faunal exhibition we now encounter is far more demanding. It is not a sticker album; rather, it is a close, disorienting encounter with a collection of non-human individuals.

This raises the question: how did the artist come across these creatures? What prompted these new interactions?

I would suggest this answer: she sought out animals when she felt the need to express new ideas in a new visual language. Collage, as noted, had long served as her primary method for exploring and naming the world, but at a certain point she felt compelled to enter a more intimate—and perhaps more painful—territory. She set aside the used pages, scissors, and glue, and with paint and brush began tracing marks and figures characterized by immediate, insistent expressiveness.

Yet the animals are not the natural outcome of this new graffiti-like approach, nor of the brutalist imagery that has dominated Abela’s work since the Covid years. Instead, they serve as privileged interlocutors through which the artist explores the foundational values of her own existence—and ours.

Even some of the titles of works produced in 2020 (Il fraintenimento involontario –Involuntary Misunderstanding, L’augurio per rinascere – A Wish for Rebirth) hint at the philosophical and reflective dimension of this portrait cycle.

In fact, they are more than mere titles: they form part of the works themselves, appearing as epigraphs, statements, or imprints, often addressed in the second person (La bestia che sei – The Beast That You Are, L’ombra tua compare – Your Shadow Appears, Quando stai nei tuoi pensieri – When You Are Lost in Your Thoughts, L’amore che non vuoi – The Love You Do Not Want). The identification is deliberately ambiguous: does the “you” refer to the subject depicted, to the viewer, to the artist, or to someone who has left a mark on Elisa’s life? In other cases, the caption are more impersonal (La paura – Fear), or evokes a condition of fated individuality: Nella rabbia isolarsi (In Anger, Isolate Yourself), La singolarità (Singularity).

That the animal world can embody even the most complex and painful aspects of human action is hardly a new idea. Here, I will limit myself to a single recent example: I miei stupidi intenti (My Stupid Intentions) by Bernardo Zannoni, a coming-of-age novel featuring a marten as its protagonist.

Elisa, however, does not seem interested in the symbolic resonance of social animal structures—such as packs, anthills, or flocks—nor in the emblematic traits of particular species. Her works are primarily individual portraits, in which a seagull, a lion, or a shark emerges against neutral, often monochrome backgrounds, asserting its presence—its very existence.

Animal presence alone constitutes a captivating and unsettling spectacle—one we encounter from childhood. Perhaps it is precisely the task of artists like Abela to guide us back to this foundational sense of wonder and disorientation, which is also, I would argue, a formative moment of reflection: interpreting forms and passing judgment on good and evil.

“A small child is taken to the zoo for the first time. This child may be any one of us, or to put it another way, we have been this child and have forgotten about it. In these grounds — these terrible grounds—the child sees living animals he has never before glimpsed; he sees jaguars, vultures, bison, and— what is still stranger — giraffes. He sees for the first time the bewildering variety of the animal kingdom, and this spectacle, which might alarm or frighten him, delights him. He enjoys it so much that going to the zoo becomes one of the pleasures of childhood, or what passes for fun. How can we explain this everyday and yet mysterious event?”

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings