Visions Are Seldom What They Seem begins from the instability of memory. Across 28 works, Nicole Debono treats remembering as something active rather than a record. Memory edits, compresses, misrecognises and rearranges each time it returns. The paintings act as constructed documents of how memory behaves.

Debono works in the language of interior painting: a controlled tonal range, compressed depth, a figure cropped to a knee, a braid, a hand held at an ambiguous angle. The domestic interior here is the subject itself. It is where roles are rehearsed, behaviour is calibrated and inheritance is passed down as script. The title work turns on a single gesture, fingers crossed behind the back: a promise made and quietly withdrawn in the same moment.

Echoing Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the exhibition proposes that painting doesn’t recover a room from memory but produces it. The show made this point before visitors reached the gallery. In the stairwell of Palazzo De La Salle, two of Debono’s paintings temporarily took the place of works from the Malta Society of Arts’ permanent display. They asked how institutions decide what enters the frame of cultural memory.