The Universal Man explores the raw, instinctive, and profoundly human. In this debut solo exhibition, artist Cristian Sammut invites us to return to a primal state of being.

​

Drawing on the lineage of early human cave art, Sammut pares back the traditions of representation to something more elemental. His portraits, painted exclusively from life, are removed from personality to become universal presences. Age, culture, and identity dissolve into gestural brushwork and fluid forms, revealing the human being beneath but never naming them. These are not individuals, but archetypes.

​

Alongside these portraits, abstract figures stretch, curl, and fragment across the surface. Limbs, torsos, and silhouettes emerge and disappear in and out of form. Sammut’s use of oil and acrylic is bold and unrepentant, smeared and splashed across the surface with minimal brushstrokes that pulse between fluidity and solidity. There is no fixed narrative, but only the suggestion of a body in motion or the echo of a gesture left behind.

​

The exhibition title suggests indistinction from one another, a shared consciousness, and a visceral return to origin. It is a journey through presence. Through this fluid connection, between emergence and dissolution, Sammut questions not just how we represent the human figure, but why we do so at all.