Patrick Fenech’s interest in photography lies where art and photography collied.  The ‘divergent’ photography that comes out from this ‘fission’ reflect an uninhibited approach to new thinking and experimentation in this field.

When the young Fenech left his brush and paint way back in the 1970s to practice photography, he immediately acknowledged the fact that the camera was the ultimate tool to project his artistic expression.  Akin to black and white studies from the Caged Spaces documentary, Fenech examined more abstract and divergent photography producing a images such as the Latent Aggression and Cradles of Elegance series  (1980s).

Photography in Malta in those days was limited to pictorialism based on rigid technique, so that the emerging Fenech soon found his way into mainstream contemporary art exhibiting this ‘new’ photography with established artists of the day at the renowned Gallerija Fenici.

Patrick Fenech’s fascination with the sea remains his primary source of inspiration reflected in the series The New Eye of Osiris.  Especially, the Mediterranean Sea embracing years of constant changes, a place where thousands of intermingled stories are told, evoking hundreds of journeys; continents where the Gods are invoked but where just one sea stirs.

The late professor Peter Serracino Inglott wrote in the Malta Arts Festival catalogue 2008, Between Calypso and Poseidon : a Prelude …… “Fenech’s images abound with reflections of the netting and vectors with which humans hunt for a livelihood in the alien world of Poseidon … shadows that enliven otherwise very austere spheres invisible to the naked human eye, … displaced metal receptacles looming like pillars in the unconsecrated temples of unknown gods … in the magical perception of an exceptional cameraman and graphic manipulator, descended from the dryland of humanity into the underworld of humidity”.