Figure In Rods – a man seemingly entrapped in a field of steel rods as he attempts to stride through them or break free – germinates from Pitrè’s experience of the building boom of the late 1960s, as he observed construction workers negotiating the steel rods of the concrete structures they worked on. Over 50 years later, those 3,000 annual construction permits have exploded to well over 65,000 – but Pitrè’s prescience on the suffocating transformation of our landscapes, and how it appeared to feed his agoraphobic sensitivities seem to be as timeless as ever for those who experience a similar anxiety towards the built environment.

As a police officer prior to turning to art as a full-time career in 1975, Pitrè would recall the time he was stationed at Mount Carmel mental health hospital, where the suffering of patients there impressed upon his mind the division between the anguish inside, and the cynicism and heartlessness of those on the outside.

“He contemplated on humanity’s struggles, a sense of entrapment, as if being in a cage,” said Prof. Cassar of an artist who also felt his experimental art did not find a public that could appreciate it.

“He felt isolated, that there was no public for his creations – not the portrait commissions or church art of course – and then only with the exception of quite a number of friends and artists.”

Fighting anxiety, the creative process however revealed a man full of energy and enthusiasm for art, which Cassar believes “liberated him from the suffering of his angst and insecurity”.

Figure In Rods

Like many of his works, Figure In Rods was built from steel rods discarded on construction sites. This apposite depiction of a cage is however not just about entrapment, but “also about freedom and empowerment, the dematerialisation of our limited physical space as expressed by the upright metal rods, restricting movement,” says Cassar.

For while Figure In Rods’s upright steel protrusions seem to be appear as barriers, the figure is not passive but appears to push forward.

As in Pitrè’s Escaped (1997), the broken box with its perilous, jagged edges broken open presents an exit from the threatening confinement of the metal cage. “It is emptiness, left behind,” says Cassar, a recurring theme found in so much of the artist’s work constructed with objets-trouvé from his walks across the Pembroke garigue. The damaged metal scarred by bullet holes from the soldiers posted at the nearby barracks would later be used for his two Guerriero (1989) sculptures for the 1999 Venice Biennale – “the twisted metal remnant of the war machine becoming a timeless reflection on violence, and key works of Pitrè’s personalised aesthetic of producing art from junk,” Cassar adds.

Indeed the MICAS exhibition displays countless works connected to Pitrè’s use of steel rods in his mixed media work, apart from similar incarnations of the Figure… such as Man In Rods (1971), as well as works that are a rejoinder to his Scream series from the 1960s – agonised and cathartic expressions of screams emerging from a tear in the canvas. As confirmed by Prof. Kenneth Wain, an old friend of the artist, they explicitly also represented Pitrè’s own screaming, vaginal egress into the world.