Cristian Sammut: 'Social media often feels like like canoeing down a river while birdwatching'

Cristian Sammut is a visual artist and architect whose work explores the instinctive, automatic, and subconscious. His interest in the unplanned and unfiltered carries over from his architectural work, which examined collective impulses for ornamentation. Rooted in the shared human experience, his paintings are raw and expressive, echoing early human mark-making and outsider art.

1. What’s been the most defining moment in your career so far?

Without a doubt, being part of ARC (Art from Rebellion and Connection), a collaborative project between UAL and The Queer Museum, has been the most defining moment in my career. The exhibition brought together artists from around the world to reflect on queer realities across different cultural contexts. It tackled themes like sex, politics, rejection, and migration, using revolution and sexual dissidence as tools for change. Being part of that conversation and that global artistic community was transformative.

2. As an artist, how do you navigate the world and speed of social media?

Terribly! It often feels like canoeing down a river while birdwatching. Joking aside, I mostly use social media to connect and explore what the world has to offer. A great example is a connection I made with an artist in New Zealand, who generously helped me with questions about materials and techniques that led to a breakthrough in my practice. We’ve never met, but a global sense of community has been created. That said, it’s easy to get sucked into the vortex, spending more time marketing art than making it, or obsessively self-reflecting like staring into a mirror.

3. Do you consider artificial intelligence a threat to your career, or an opportunity?

Art is about a point of view. For example; why has the artist chosen that subject and what is the context that surrounds it? Technique and materiality are often secondary.  AI, at least currently, lacks a true point of view. It creates from existing data, most of which originates from Euro-American contexts since the mid-90s. That leaves out vast swathes of the global experience and carries with it embedded biases. Although AI offers huge utilitarian potential in the creative process the true purpose of art still needs us. There is truth to the phrase ‘Art is life. Life is art’. That said, I am open to the idea that there may be a time in the future when machines acquire consciousness and that may change.

4. How do you stay motivated and inspired, especially during tough times or when the work feels hard?

I’d love to claim to be the lightning-struck artist, but even inspiration takes work. Like staying physically fit, motivation needs practice. I find inspiration in the everyday whether it’s painting tiny landscapes, observing human quirks, or jotting down overheard phrases. These seemingly unrelated things accumulate over time and sometimes unwittingly feed into my work. I carry materials everywhere and try to draw connections between ideas. And when all else fails, I remember Andy Warhol’s quote ‘Don’t think about making art, just get it done’. Once, out of sheer desperation, I made a painting with ketchup and mayonnaise!

5. How do you balance your creative instincts with the expectations of your audience or collaborators?

Expectation, what a concept! I try my best not to think about expectation of others mainly because it can change my direction of travel or intuitive drives. I prefer to produce the work and collaborate organically with others rather than let external criteria dictate a given direction. Being true to yourself isn’t just a cliché it’s the foundation of good art. That said, art is nothing if it remains inside a cupboard, or worse in one’s head, so connecting with the world is fundamental and necessary to bring the art to an audience and there is great value in the input of others in making this happen. The reactions art provokes can be surprising and insightful.

6. How do you approach a new project? Do you have a specific process or routine you follow?

It really depends on the project at hand, but I usually begin by collecting sketches, overheard phrases, photographs or anything that catches my eye or sticks in my mind. From there, I start to distil these into a body of work. When I’m working on portraits, specific routines and interactions with people come into play. My process is often labyrinthine, with many false starts, but I find that breakthroughs tend to happen in moments of disorder rather than routine.

7. Can you let us in on some of the future projects, works?

There are a couple in development. One revolves around the meaning imbued in words, and it’s evolving into a series of paintings that might move away from strict figuration. But I can’t say much more as it hasn’t revealed itself to me yet. Another project is in collaboration with a UK-based artist, focusing on the genocide in Gaza. We’re exploring the duality between everyday caring and co-existing violence, and how that tension reflects our human and perhaps great ape consciousness.

Bonus round

Who are your biggest influences, and how have they shaped your work?

There are so many! I tend to gravitate towards non-western art more naturally. I find indigenous Australian art to be so seemingly effortless and natural while Chinese and Japanese calligraphy have an electricity and immediacy in the brushwork that reveal ‘the act of doing’ into a single moment or gesture which has really influenced the way I paint. In the western canon I was greatly influenced by the American expressionists like De Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler which were all about the gesture. There’s also Howard Hodgkin, Frank Auerbach, the German Expressionists, Munch, Hokusai, Goya’s black paintings to the depths of despair and Rubens’ elation into the heavens. I’m equally inspired by early cave paintings and street art; both raw and direct, both reaching for something fundamental and human.